


Even a small love

by shecrows



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bottom Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Dubious Consent, First Time, M/M, Mind Control, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Top Jaskier | Dandelion, geralt can have little a tenderness as a treat, jaskier can be a ruthless bitch but like in a tender way, the rape/non-con/dubcon is between jaskier and an original character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:55:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22473670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shecrows/pseuds/shecrows
Summary: “Well,” Jaskier replies distractedly. “Lots of things want to strangle you.”“You don’t.”It isn’t a particularly troublesome accusation, or even necessarily an accusation at all.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion/Original Character(s)
Comments: 392
Kudos: 4910
Collections: Best Geralt, kashiichan's favourites, wiedźmin





	Even a small love

**Author's Note:**

> [nervous laughter] what the fuck?
> 
> this could be canon compliant, if you wanted it to be. set somewhere between episodes 5 and 6. this fic is mostly based on the netflix show, but there are some allusions to video game mechanics thrown in because i couldn't help myself.
> 
>  **please see the notes at the end for more extensive details about the content warning tags**.
> 
> this is dedicated to [ruth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/earwen_neruda/pseuds/earwen_neruda), who is going to immediately paste this fic into a word doc and replace "jaskier" with "dandelion."
> 
> also, there is now **[ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE (NSFW) ART](https://twitter.com/chococo_mao/status/1237032622787719174)** to go along with this fic! i will be staring at it for the rest of my natural life! please go check it out and yell at the artist about how good it is!

Geralt grunts. “Jaskier, I need you.”  
  
Jaskier looks up from the ties on his shirt, momentarily abandoning them. The small, rectangular mirror before him reflects the room behind. It saves him from having to turn around to see Geralt sitting on a stool and reaching over his own shoulder, looking grim—an expression which, on Geralt, could mean any number of things.  
  
“You need me. Oh, _now_ you need me? Not half an hour ago when I smashed my lute over that bandit’s head because you were too delirious to hear him coming after getting, what, torn to slivers by whatever thing you had to go kill in the woods,” Jaskier says, gesturing a flourish at Geralt’s reflection which Geralt absolutely does not see.  
  
“Hm,” Geralt grunts again, eloquently, still reaching.  
  
Jaskier watches the muscle in Geralt’s shoulder strain, and he’s spoiled for choice, really, right now, in the straining muscles department, what with all of Geralt’s on display like that. Then there’s a low hiss, and a soft clatter, and Geralt doesn’t curse, but he does bow his head, shoulders slumping.  
  
“You know, you really look rather pitiful right now.” Jaskier turns around.  
  
Geralt lifts his head minutely. His golden eyes are narrowed but, for once, it lacks rancor.  
  
“Oh, alright.” He crosses his arms over his chest and continues in high-handed tones, “Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, poet and minstrel of considerable renown in the Northern Kingdoms, is at your—oh, you know, don’t make that face,” he interjects at Geralt’s look of faint incredulity, presumably at the bit about renown. Despite this, he pointedly finishes, “Your _service_.”  
  
The corner of Geralt’s mouth twitches. “Didn’t know you were a viscount.”  
  
Jaskier makes a show of examining his nails. “Well there’s lots of things you don’t know about me, Geralt, aren’t there. I’m not just some _open book_ lying around for your perusal, thank you. I have depths. Layers. Are you going to tell me what you need, or are you just going to sit there, bleeding at me? You do it well, but I’d rather not be left in such dreadful suspense.”  
  
Geralt leans to pick something up off the floor. He looks as though it costs him to do it, which for any normal human being would be a given—Jaskier’s eyesight is perfectly intact, and he can see quite plainly, in the liberally gouged expanse of Geralt’s chest, that whatever Geralt fought in the woods was neither friendly nor easy to subdue—but Geralt is no ordinary human, or entirely a human at all, a point on which he’s ever so keen to perseverate. Jaskier finds himself a little taken in by the sight of Geralt hurting like any common man on the street, all the more because he isn’t one.  
  
Not that Jaskier _enjoys_ the sight, it’s only—well, it’s only that Geralt pretends a lot of the time that he’s only one thing, as though anyone ever is, let alone someone like Geralt.  
  
Geralt is holding something in his outstretched palm.  
  
“Hm?” Jaskier’s arms fall to his sides, and he steps forward. “Sorry, what is that?”  
  
“Extract from a powerful root,” Geralt says, nothing of the strain in his voice, in spite of the tension in the lines of his face that speaks of real, naked pain. Jaskier frowns at it. “It’ll speed the process, help with regeneration. Slow the bleeding. Just enough to give my body time to heal the rest.”  
  
“Alright,” Jaskier says slowly, taking the little pot of—salve, is it? From Geralt’s hand. He holds it up to his nose and inhales. The scent is strong but not quite medicinal, earthy and thick enough to make him cough. “ _Whoof_ , yeah, alright. So I’ll just—?”  
  
He scoops some onto his fingers and reaches for the wounds on Geralt’s chest. Geralt catches his wrist in a firm, apprehending grip.  
  
“Well it’s going to be a bit difficult if you aren’t going to let me touch you, Geralt—”  
  
“Not those,” Geralt says.  
  
Jaskier considers what he’d seen Geralt doing in the mirror.  
  
“Right,” says Jaskier. He gives his wrist a pointed little shake. Geralt lets go, gaze trained on some spot on the floor to the left of Jaskier’s feet, apparently not of a mind to give any further instruction. “Right, I’ll just mosey on back here, then, shall I, and _oh my merciful_ —”  
  
He steps behind the witcher and nearly drops the pot of salve.  
  
“Geralt, what in—what in the name of _Elder blooded devilry_ is _that_ , are those _teeth_ , and _if they are_ , to _what_ —did they…” His voice has gone high-pitched and wavery, he can’t help it. Geralt’s back looks a far sight worse than his front, and that’s an understatement. The creature, whatever it was, nearly took out his whole shoulder blade, flesh hanging in ribbons around a gaping wound, and those are _definitely_ teeth marks, though the what of it all he’s not convinced he actually wants to know. The room around him sways a little. “Geralt, I think I can see the _muscle_ —”  
  
Geralt sighs. “Jaskier.”  
  
“ _What_ ,” Jaskier squeaks.  
  
His eyes snap up—and for what an unholy sight it is, it takes some doing, to relinquish it—to see Geralt’s profile frowning heavily at him, the side of his face candlelit and grave.  
  
“Sorry, that’s just—” His eyes flick from the unyielding line of Geralt’s jaw to the wound and back. He fists one hand underneath his chin, head tilting sideways. “There’s a _lot_ going on back here.”  
  
“Are you going to make me say it again?”  
  
Distractedly, Jaskier says, “Maybe you’d better.”  
  
A low rumble. “I need—"  
  
Jaskier lets out a thready little breath. “Yes, alright! Alright, but shouldn’t we—hm. Shouldn’t we get you to a, a healer or something?”  
  
Geralt shakes his head. “It’s not that bad. It’ll keep.”  
  
“Not that— _it’ll_ —” Jaskier struggles, incensed and unable to decide which part of what Geralt just said is more ludicrous. “Would you like me to paint you a _picture_?”  
  
Geralt angles a sidelong look over his shoulder. “Didn’t think that was your medium.”  
  
“I’m well rounded,” Jaskier snaps, which isn’t true.  
  
Geralt is impossible, that’s his problem. Oh certainly he _acts_ like the sensible one, the practical one, doling out hard truths about what’s what in the big bad world in a way that’s usually meant as a kindness and is rarely ever perceived as such, but then he’s also the first one to go around with a chunk of his back missing and think oh, I know, the _bard_ can handle this—  
  
“Jaskier.”  
  
“Oh shut up, you need me, I heard you,” Jaskier mutters, and Geralt is facing forward again, denying him even his profile. Jaskier trains his glare on the back of his disheveled white head. “I’m furious with you, by the way. Come here.”  
  
He grips Geralt’s uninjured shoulder. Geralt’s skin is warm in spite of the blood loss, in spite of his slow-beating heart, but then it always is. Jaskier steels himself and looks down again, the raw, angry edges of the wound all torn and raised.

He frowns deeply and asks, “You killed this thing, right?”  
  
Geralt’s response is dry. “I’m here, aren’t I?”  
  
“Yes, well,” Jaskier allows, “most of you,” and, seeing nowhere else conveniently within reach, decisively settles the little pot of root extract on top of Geralt’s head.  
  
The line of Geralt’s shoulders tenses.  
  
“Yes, you’re getting it,” says Jaskier, a little meanly. “Hold very still.”  
  
He sort of expects Geralt to fight him on this point, but he doesn’t. Instead, he does exactly as Jaskier instructs. Even his breaths seem to slow and deepen, hardly taking up any space at all. Jaskier tightens his hold on Geralt’s shoulder experimentally, feeling him neither move nor give way, just warm, solid muscle under his palm that holds and bears him. Who knew Geralt of Rivia could be so biddable? Or, maybe, the aforementioned blood loss.  
  
A point to reflect upon later, Jaskier decides.  
  
He pulls his bottom lip between his teeth and pauses, hand poised over the outer edge of Geralt’s injury. “Does this stuff just sort of go everywhere?”  
  
“Mm,” Geralt grunts.  
  
Jaskier snorts delicately. “Illuminating, thank you.”  
  
Well, Jaskier thinks, how hard could it be? He frowns, touching two coated fingertips to a particularly gruesome spot just to the right of Geralt’s spine. If he squints, he can almost picture the maw of the creature that did this, each jagged, razor-sharp fang gouging and then tearing, a bite diameter nearly the length of Jaskier’s forearm. It’s a novel way to get the details, if a bit imprecise. He hums a little under his breath, trying to think of a phrase that rhymes with _toothy maw_ —relentless jaw? ne’er before saw? devoured flesh raw?—when Geralt draws a slow hiss of breath in between his teeth and holds it.  
  
Jaskier stops.  
  
“Keep going,” Geralt says, inflectionless. From his steadying grip, Jaskier can feel the tension in him, tight as a loaded coil spring.  
  
“Or maybe,” says Jaskier, “you can go lie on the bed over there, and then I’ll keep going.”  
  
Geralt’s voice skews toward impatience. “I don’t need—"  
  
“No, no,” Jaskier continues with an air of finality. “No, you’ve been very clear about what you need, and I’m going to have to insist.” He snatches the pot of salve from atop Geralt’s head and gestures him with a grand shooing motion that is lost entirely on the rigid length of Geralt’s back. “Go on.”  
  
The inn, much like the town of Kerwald itself, isn’t anything fancy, but it’s serviceable. They’ve been traveling together since Rinde, and as such have largely dispensed with the formality of separate rooms except on occasions when either of them seeks out other company, which Geralt hasn’t, lately, and Jaskier isn’t fool enough to stir up that pot by asking why. It keeps more coin in their purses between contracts and performances, respectively, even if in little townships like these the latter earns them coin less often than it earns them hot food and drink from a tavern keeper in deference to whatever uptick in patronage Jaskier’s expert singing and lute-playing might provide.  
  
At this point they’ve shared bath water about as often as they’ve shared hot meals, and if Geralt still doesn’t seem especially enthused with the arrangement, he has at least stopped trying to shake Jaskier off at every opportunity, which, in sixteen long years of crossing and diverging paths, is a first. Jaskier would be pleased, only he’s pretty certain it’s a guilt thing over what happened with the djinn. Which is stupid, really, but Geralt’s got guilt complexes about pretty much everything, and Jaskier knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.  
  
He's barely finished arranging the pillows—of which there are precisely two, flat and rather sad-looking—when Geralt appears on the other side of the bed, expression on the sourer end of his usual repertoire.  
  
“It’ll be easier this way, trust me,” Jaskier says with a benevolent smile, and he’s going to say more—to put Geralt at ease, of course—only the words die a stillborn sort of death on his tongue as Geralt strips out of dirty, blood-stained trousers without ceremony and settles face down on the bed.  
  
“This sufficient?”  
  
“Well, I didn’t say you _had_ to be naked,” he replies calmly.  
  
Geralt shifts, stuffing an arm under the pillow by his head. “I intend to sleep after this,” is all he says, and falls silent, stilling.  
  
“Oh you intend that, do you,” Jaskier intones, uncertain where the unpleasant edge in his voice comes from.  
  
Geralt notices it, opening one eye a crack and raising an eyebrow. Jaskier throws a blanket over him indelicately, or at least the parts of him Jaskier hasn’t been invited to tend, and sits down on the bed next to Geralt’s hip.  
  
At a glance, this arrangement is easier. Geralt’s muscles, though still tense with injury, don’t appear quite so tightly locked down that Jaskier could trace the outline of each one with a finger. It occurs to him briefly how vulnerable this looks, Geralt prostrate on the bed without a scrap of clothing on, one shoulder out of commission, or nearly. He dismisses the notion just as quickly. He’s seen Geralt blast things clear across a room with nothing but a thought and intention. As long as Geralt’s conscious and breathing, he’s well capable of snapping Jaskier in half without any limbs left to him at all.  
  
Still, it’s something that Geralt’s asked, albeit in his own way of asking, more gesturing than words. On the whole that may be more vulnerable a thing than any measure of nakedness or injury, and Jaskier fumbles with the feeling of how that sits with him, uncertain how to touch it.  
  
This time when he starts to apply the salve over Geralt’s wound, he doesn’t think about scanning and rhyme, doesn’t hum anything under his breath. He thinks about the way Geralt is breathing, slow and even. He watches closely for when it catches and twists into something resembling discomfort, and gentles his touch where he can.  
  
“Tried to make a right meal out of you, didn’t he,” Jaskier says after several minutes of prolonged silence.  
  
He looks away from Geralt’s back for a moment to find that Geralt’s eyes have drifted shut.  
  
The silence descends again, stretching. At any other time Jaskier would probably fill it with whatever popped into his head first, but he looks back at the wound instead, shoulders bowed a little, and applies more of the extract as carefully as he knows how. Occasionally he finds his own breaths mirroring Geralt’s slow ones, a tidaling back and forth, inhale for exhale. There’s a tempo to it, a metronome he follows in the back of his mind, like learning a new song. It steadies his hands.  
  
Long after Jaskier has stopped expecting any response, Geralt rumbles: “She.”  
  
“Hm,” Jaskier says philosophically.  
  
A minute ticks by, and another. The burrs in Geralt’s breathing become less frequent, as does the need to fill the silence. It’s almost meditative—if Jaskier went in for that sort of thing, which he doesn’t.  
  
At the tail end of a long, slow breath, Geralt says, “Bukavac.”  
  
Jaskier frowns, picking a bit of grit out of Geralt’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, was that a sneeze or did you actually say something?”  
  
“Creature,” says Geralt, speaking as though each word needs to be cushioned by a long pause on either side. “Has horns. Wanted to strangle me.”  
  
“Well,” Jaskier replies distractedly. “Lots of things want to strangle you.”  
  
“You don’t.”  
  
It isn’t a particularly troublesome accusation, or even necessarily an accusation at all. But something in the way Geralt aims it gives him pause.  
  
Jaskier straightens to peer over Geralt’s shoulder. His unsmiling face gives away very little, even less for the fact that his eyes remain closed. He looks nearly asleep, if it were feasible for a man to sleep while having someone prodding away at their fleshy insides.  
  
He opens his mouth, closes it. Broadly speaking, Jaskier’s never really wanted to strangle anyone; he believes in making love, not war, as the saying goes. But he’s traveled with Geralt often enough to know that there are many ways in which people can be unkind and that violence is only one of them, and a lesser one at that.  
  
Long minutes pass. He finishes with the salve. The little pot is almost empty, Jaskier’s fingers tacky with residue and Geralt’s blood. Geralt’s back looks every bit as gored as it did half an hour ago, if he’s honest, though admittedly it has stopped oozing. The line of his face in profile is relaxed in a way that very nearly hurts to look at, so Jaskier doesn’t, for very long.  
  
“I could never want to hurt you,” Jaskier says, and winces at how ridiculous it sounds to say out loud. “I know that doesn’t really matter the way things in your world seem to matter. I mean, not that I could. Me being me, and you being… Geralt?”  
  
He prods at Geralt’s hip.  
  
Geralt doesn’t stir.  
  
He prods it again, harder, and still: no response.  
  
Pointedly, he clears his throat. “Geralt, I’m taking Roach. We’ll be back before dawn, alright? Sound good? Fantastic.”  
  
Nothing. He gazes down at the man, every sculpted bit of him that the blanket doesn’t cover. His legs are a sight too long for the threadbare thing; Jaskier can see his heels. What sort of a man even has pretty heels? It’s unconscionable.

He sighs.   
  
“It’d be easier to stomach, you know, if monsters were the worst of it. I think you’d like me to believe that they are.” He traces the ridge of Geralt’s spine, well away from his mangled shoulder. He has no excuse to do it. If Geralt is awake he can damn well stop him—but the moment stretches, and nothing does. “I think you’d like me to believe it doesn’t bother you. That you prefer it that way. But it bothers me. And the longer I know you, the less I forgive them for it.”  
  
He scrubs Geralt’s blood from his hands in the small water basin in the corner of the room. Then he ventures downstairs into the common area, returning a while later with his arms full of whatever he could coax from the tavern keeper for an hour’s worth of playing.  
  
“I have food,” he declares, fumbling a little with the plate and pitcher and shutting the door with his foot, “and… wine, and—”  
  
Jaskier stares, dumbfounded. The flesh over Geralt’s shoulder blade has almost entirely stitched closed.  
  
He sets the plate and wine pitcher down and hastens to Geralt’s side, palm flattening over newly healed skin, needing to feel it to believe—a little pink and serrated where the flesh had been mangled, there’d definitely be scarring, but—unbelievably and improbably whole.  
  
It’s nothing short of a marvel.  
  
“Did you take my horse?” Geralt demands.  
  
Jaskier jerks his hand back as though the question has tried to bite him.  
  
“What? No. What?” Jaskier’s hands go to his hips for lack of anywhere better. “You _were_ listening.”  
  
Geralt doesn’t even do him the courtesy of opening his eyes. “No. Yeah. Sort of.”  
  
“You know, the strangling thing, I get it now,” Jaskier says after a beat, turning on his heel because wine seems like a good idea. He sloshes some into a goblet and drinks. Across the room, Geralt remains broad and unmoving as a mountain. Horrible mountain man. “If you could try being a bit _more_ vague, actually, that might help.”  
  
“It’s hard to explain,” Geralt says, voice slow and deep like the shifting of tectonic plates. Over the edge of the bed, his toes curl and uncurl. Jaskier’s gaze lingers there, a little, transfixed. “Regenerative sleep, it’s—more like meditating. Deeply. I can hear some things, sometimes. But I can’t come out of it. Not easily.”  
  
Jaskier pales at how defenseless it sounds.  
  
Geralt opens his eyes. “You left.”  
  
“Well, I—” He fumbles, suddenly defensive. “Just _downstairs_.”  
  
“Hm.”  
  
“To fetch you _sustenance_ ,” Jaskier continues, waving his goblet around and spilling some of its contents onto the floor. He looks down at it disconsolately. “Because, you know. The healing. Keeping your strength up. Not that you needed any help, apparently.”  
  
Geralt sits up, blanket pooling at his hips, and looks at him, eyes shaded a deep gold. He stands, and the blanket falls away. Jaskier abruptly pretends to be preoccupied with fishing something out of his goblet.  
  
“It went… easier,” Geralt says once he’s close, pausing to examine the plate of food to Jaskier’s left. After a beat, he adds, “With your help.”  
  
“Oof,” mutters Jaskier, smiling in spite of himself. “Did that hurt?”  
  
Geralt shrugs one shoulder pointedly. “This hurt. Doesn’t anymore.”  
  
“Well,” Jaskier allows.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
Jaskier looks up, startled. Geralt is much closer than he realized.  
  
“Your eyes are very… gold,” he ventures cautiously.  
  
“Hm,” Geralt says, and places a hand on Jaskier’s jaw, and kisses him.  
  
Jaskier drops the goblet.  
  
The moment bursts like a soap bubble: quiet and inevitable, without fanfare. Geralt pulls back, still cupping Jaskier’s jaw in one wide palm. Jaskier, unwillingly, leans into it, heart drumming very loudly.  
  
“You know,” Geralt says, swiping a thumb once over Jaskier’s cheek, “witchers can read minds.”  
  
Jaskier’s heart kicks all the way up into his throat.  
  
“ _What_.” He slaps Geralt’s hand away, stumbling backwards. To say that he doesn’t topple over is true, if generous; his backside runs into a table before gravity can see to the rest. He waves a finger at him, something very like panic making his voice thin. “Geralt. That’s _not_ true.”  
  
Geralt looks at him for a long moment, then takes the plate of food and relents. “It’s not true,” he agrees, and walks back over to the bed, bare-assed as the day he was born.  
  
Jaskier stares after him, feeling as though he’s been flayed, a little. Then he lifts the pitcher of wine and drains it.  
  
Geralt, damn him to every conceivable hell, actually has the gall to make a rough sound of protest from across the room.  
  
“Something is broken in your brain,” Jaskier says, and leaves.  
  
He haggles the barman for three more pitchers of wine, this time expediting the process with coin. Halfway through the second one, his hands stop trembling.  
  
He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He does, however, have a vague recollection of waking up in the cradle of Geralt’s arms, which deposit him onto a soft surface with unexpected care. He mutters a protest, half-formed. He feels himself engulfed in heat. In the morning, he turns to stare at an indent in the bedding on a bed too small for two.

  
  
Jaskier resolves not to be the one to bring it up first.  
  
This lasts for about six hours.  
  
“It’s only that I don’t understand why you would say that,” Jaskier argues, “if it wasn’t true.”  
  
“Here I thought you’d be more upset about the kiss,” Geralt grumbles.  
  
“Oh, are we calling that a kiss?” asks Jaskier, feeling immeasurably petty. Which typically he only does when his feelings are hurt, but that would be stupid. Geralt can do as he likes. “Never mind. Do you know what your problem is?”  
  
Geralt snorts indelicately. “This should be good.”  
  
“ _You_ think all intimacy is fleeting. No one will ever want to be here with you again. And then you _push_ , and make it happen, as though that’s some kind of—” He waves a hand over Geralt’s shoulder. “Some kind of victory, because you made it happen. I mean, Geralt, aside from Roach, is there anything you _keep_?”  
  
Geralt is silent for so long that Jaskier suspects he’s either hit his mark or Geralt has gone narcoleptic all of a sudden. He peers over Geralt’s shoulder, taking in the placid set of his mouth, and scoffs loudly.  
  
“No, please,” Geralt says dispassionately, “keep going.”  
  
“I’m beginning to understand why so many people pelt you with vegetables,” Jaskier says, a bit mutinous. “Might purchase a few tomatoes myself.”  
  
“To clarify,” Geralt says, “this is still about the mind reading.”  
  
“It was a very dishonest way to provoke me.”  
  
“Provoke you.”  
  
“What would you call it?”  
  
“Which part?”  
  
Jaskier huffs an incredulous breath.  
  
“Did you wake up today intending to be this difficult, or were you just particularly inspired? Have I done something? It’s because I threatened to take Roach. No, I know, it’s because I told the madame at the brothel in Tretogor that the bit in my song about your adamantine balls was literal and then she charged you extra for the—”  
  
“I told you to stop singing that song.”  
  
“And I have.”  
  
“Singing it in brothels still counts as singing.”  
  
“You’re being very particular.”  
  
“They’re my balls.”  
  
“Nominally. But in the canon of White Wolf classics penned by yours truly—”  
  
“We’re not doing this again.”  
  
“—your balls belong to the people now, Geralt, adamantine or no.”  
  
Night falls before they make it to the next town along the Pontar. They set up camp in a small grove of flowering trees, an uneasy truce between them. The thing about Geralt is that his mind works in strange ways. It’s not entirely his fault. It’s all that time spent alone with only monsters and Roach for company. Civilization spat him out, and though he wears the veneer of it when he has to, it’s always a veneer. Mostly, Jaskier finds it a refreshing change of pace. Other times it feels so impenetrable it may as well be a language he can’t understand.  
  
Bewildering methods aside, it’s not as though he doesn’t realize he’s betrayed something. It’s only that he can’t sit still and look at it long enough to decide what it was. Geralt had seemed to take it as some kind of answer regardless, and Jaskier feels himself at a precarious disadvantage because he can’t even be sure of the question.  
  
They spit and roast a grouse between them. Geralt hands Jaskier his flask, and Jaskier drinks from it. He casts about for some easy banter to level out the mood, but it was easier to do from on top of a horse; he keeps coming up against the shape of Geralt’s mouth cast in firelight.  
  
Geralt, for his part, looks calm as anything.  
  
“Here’s a thought,” says Jaskier.  
  
“Really? I was enjoying the silence.”  
  
Jaskier ignores him. “I’ll drop it if you let me sing _Adamantine Love_ at the Duchess de Lavorre’s coming-of-age fete in the spring.”  
  
The corner of Geralt’s mouth moves slowly. With a wave of his hand, he puts the fire out.  
  
“Goodnight, Jaskier.”  
  
  
  
It was a professor at Oxenfurt who told him that a poet is defined by what he keeps. No one sees the words that are culled from the page.  
  
For a long time, Jaskier culled nothing, greedy for the world before he’d ever even truly stepped out into it. His appetite was indiscriminate, voracious, and he found himself spread thin and muddled by the desire to keep everything.  
  
These days he sees himself a little more clearly. He keeps things carefully, deliberately. Confidences. Secrets, rarely, when there’s use for them, which isn’t often. He keeps quiet moments for himself and relegates the louder ones to the songs by which he’ll be remembered, if they’re worth remembering.  
  
Geralt falls somewhere between the two, and so Jaskier keeps him someplace else entirely.  
  
Weeks pass without any other significant maulings. Or kisses, for that matter, though Jaskier’s hardly counting. Neither of them has so much as alluded to it since that day in the woods. Jaskier isn’t certain why he doesn’t bring it up again, except that every time his thoughts wander anywhere near it, he sort of just hurts in his entire body.  
  
If Geralt doesn’t feel like explaining himself, that’s his business.  
  
“And anyway, we have more pressing matters to attend to, haven’t we. _Such_ as,” Jaskier pauses in front of the notice board, squinting at the vast number of postings soliciting aid for coin, “our next adventure. What’ll it be, Geralt? ‘A vile, dangerous spook, beast or devil, causing no end of trouble,’ always good, dare I say—a classic. ‘Wife went missing in the woods,’ well, there could be a simple answer there, dear fellow. Ooh, or this one, a good, old haunted _well_ , water-logged corpses mysteriously appearing, poisoned water supply.”  
  
He looks over at Geralt, who appears to be gazing at the notice board with about as much interest as a ghoul in a brothel. After a moment, Geralt grunts wordlessly and walks away.  
  
“Or we could… not,” Jaskier says, sparing one last curious glance at a notice about a man having strange dreams and waking up in the middle of the afternoon with all of his clothes turned inside out. He trots on after Geralt. “Sure, we could just, walk away, only—is something wrong? Geralt? It’s been weeks since you’ve taken a contract.”  
  
Geralt smirks. On him, it looks more like a grimace. “Worried about getting enough fodder for your ballads?”  
  
“Now you mention it, that last one is getting a bit stale.” Jaskier hums, thoughtful. “No, you’ve been very inspiring, don’t get me wrong. _I_ could compose compelling stanzas about camping in the woods with a man and a horse for weeks on end, but that’s simply not what the people _want_.”  
  
“Mm.”  
  
“People can be very fickle, Geralt. They’re eating out of your hand one minute, then lobbing rotten apple cores the next. You must _learn_ them. Like learning a lover, it’s all the same thing. Tell me, have we been going this way for any _particular_ reason, or is aimless wandering a part of the lifestyle?”  
  
Geralt’s eyebrows give the tiniest upward hitch. “Maybe it is.”  
  
“Oh, I see. You’re trying to bore me into leaving.”  
  
“Why’d you leave Oxenfurt?”  
  
Jaskier glances at him sidelong. “I got claustrophobic.”  
  
Geralt snorts, then gently pulls Roach to a halt. “I need to head north of the river.”  
  
“So it’s _not_ aimless wandering,” Jaskier acknowledges, triumphant. “What do you need to do in Kaedwen?”  
  
Geralt sighs. “Let’s get a drink.”  
  
A couple of full tankards of substandard ale later, tucked away in a dark corner of what he’s fairly certain is the only tavern in the entire village, Jaskier finds himself staring down at a worn missive with a feeling of profound consternation.  
  
“Right, well, here’s what I propose,” Jaskier says, having read through the thing twice. “A moratorium on chasing after power-hungry mages. Imagine all we could do instead! Literally. _Anything_ else.” Geralt takes a pull from his tankard but appears largely unmoved. Jaskier’s shoulders sag infinitesimally. “You said an herbalist gave you this?”  
  
“Outside of Ellander,” Geralt confirms. “Said there were a few of them making their way around the northern kingdoms.”  
  
“Just in case a witcher happens to come along?”  
  
Geralt shrugs. “Don’t make ourselves easy to find these days.”  
  
“Odd that they’d look to monster hunters to bring a runaway Ban Ard boy to heel. Not really your bag, is it? Or have you perhaps acquired a new soft spot for mages, especially when they’re of the,” Jaskier waggles his fingers, “horrible, mildly terrifying variety? What on earth could have sparked this predilection, I can’t even begin to g—”  
  
Geralt kicks him lightly under the table, expression barely flickering.  
  
“Point taken.” Something tugs behind Jaskier’s breastbone, and he smiles around it. Tilts his head. “You want to get to this mage before anyone less scrupulous does,” he ventures. The missive was pretty clear about _dead or alive_. It was also very clear about the size of the reward. He taps his fingers along the edges of the folded parchment, studying Geralt carefully. “What if, and here’s a thought: what if they can’t be reasoned with?”  
  
Geralt’s gaze slides over to him like a bolted lock. “Then I’ll have failed,” he replies simply. “I’m not going to kill anyone for them.”  
  
Soon after, Geralt stands, leaving a few coins on the table. His departure lightens the mood inside the tavern almost instantly, the low murmur of patrons’ voices rising to a proper din. At the bar, someone laughs, then makes an exceedingly rude gesture at the door through which Geralt just left. Jaskier frowns and considers his lute, propped up on the chair beside him.  
  
“You know, that man is going to kill your devil beastie,” Jaskier tells the patron at the bar.  
  
By the looks of him, the receding hair at his temples that’s only just starting to show silver, Jaskier would put him at roughly middle-aged—but his hands look older, gnarled and roughened with work. Carpenter’s hands, or a farmer’s. He looks Jaskier up and down contemptuously and spits onto the floor next to Jaskier’s boots, which have seen better days.  
  
“Only devil here just left this establishment,” the man says, lips thinned with distaste. “And if that’s the company you keep, you’d do well to leave, too, bard.”  
  
Low mutterings of agreement rumble down the length of the bar. Jaskier tries to draw from the well of compassion he normally reserves for this sort of thing but finds it, on the whole, dry. It was easier to defend Geralt when he and the witcher crossed paths only rarely, easier to look people like these in their faces and smile and make light, humor them into viewing Geralt a bit more charitably, patiently and with a flashy song until it felt like their idea, a realization they came to all on their own. They were often hard people used to even harder lives, and Jaskier felt for them.  
  
Just now all he can feel is anger.  
  
“Oh, I’m happy to,” he says agreeably. He touches his palms together in front of his chest, giving a little halfway bow. “Ecstatic, even, to leave. Good luck with your poisoned well, by the way. Oh, and it isn’t haunted. You see, ghosts don’t _throw_ corpses down wells, they just, well, they can’t. Which means you’ve probably got a murderer in your midst, how exciting! We’ll check in sometime, shall we, dying to see how that goes.”  
  
One of the other bar patrons looks ready to throw his full tankard at Jaskier’s head.  
  
“Bye,” he says, and hastens out of the tavern.  
  
Outside, Geralt is nowhere to be found. But he’s left Roach, which means he can’t be far. Probably trying to pawn off a few trinkets before heading onwards, though by the look of it, the villagers here haven’t much in the way of coin to spare. Jaskier almost feels bad for his dig about the well.  
  
He lifts a hand to Roach’s muzzle. She bumps her face against it, then nips reproachfully at his fingers when she finds them devoid of food.  
  
“I know,” he mutters softly, placating. “It was a mean thing to say. Probably we should stay and help them. But you know how it is, don’t you? You’ve been with him for, what? Ages.” He strokes the side of her long neck, trying to catch her eye. “ _You_ love him.”  
  
She knocks her muzzle into the side of his face. One corner of his mouth tugs up, then sobers.  
  
“Yeah.” He scritches her neck one last time. “Yeah, alright. That’s what I thought.”  
  
Geralt reappears eventually, pausing in his step to stare a little when he catches sight of Jaskier seated on an old tree stump, Roach nuzzling and attempting to eat his hair in turns. Jaskier squints, narrowly missing a muzzle to the eye, and waves at him.  
  
“I think we’ve finally bonded,” Jaskier calls out. “Talked it out. Broke through some walls.”  
  
Geralt gives his head a single minute shake and walks over. He puts a few new parcels into Roach’s saddlebags, giving Jaskier a brief sideways look, brows drawn with something that’s smoothed over too quickly for Jaskier to name.  
  
“Beast of theirs sounds like a wyvern,” Geralt says, looking away, and Jaskier straightens. “Mostly it’s been picking off livestock from the outlying farms, but last week it took a little girl.”  
  
“Well,” says Jaskier, “shit.”  
  
  
  
They camp on the outskirts of the village. It’s near enough to dusk that Geralt seems confident the beast won’t try to attack until it’s light again, though Jaskier hears him muttering to himself about luring it in, whatever that means, and then he’s off doing his tracking thing, which—well, it’s all part of the process, but it doesn’t lend itself well to verse, at all. He’s tried. He can make a lot of things sound good, but his limit, apparently, is Geralt going around staring at individual blades of grass while smelling the air very loudly.  
  
What Geralt meant becomes heavily apparent the following morning when, not an hour after the sun has risen, he lumbers back to camp with a skewered elk hoisted over his shoulders. He dumps it entirely too close to where Jaskier is blinking sleep out of his eyes while trying not to look scandalized.  
  
“I need a minute,” Geralt says, then kneels, closes his eyes, and goes silent.  
  
Jaskier stares, dubious. “Geralt?”  
  
There’s no answer.  
  
“Right.” Jaskier waves his fingers at where Geralt is knelt in perfect stillness. “You’re doing your… meditating. Thing.”  
  
He scrubs a hand over his face, attempting valiantly to ignore the hulking elk carcass oozing blood a stone’s throw away from his bedroll. He thinks: _you_ chose this, Jaskier, _you_ did, and laughs quietly around a yawn, casting his gaze all around their little camp, such as it is. It pulls inevitably back to Geralt, who has once again gone functionally blind and deaf to all the world, but has done it in Jaskier’s presence. Warmth blooms behind his breastbone.  
  
He's just sort of sitting there gazing at him when Geralt’s eyes open, golden and just faintly unfocused.  
  
Jaskier smothers a cough into his fist and looks away.  
  
“Well? All topped up, are you?”  
  
Geralt swallows down one of his potions by way of answer, a pretty golden thing that would surely tear up Jaskier’s insides and see him dead within the hour.  
  
“Stay here,” Geralt says, getting to his feet. “I’m setting the bait far enough away that you shouldn’t be in any danger, but if it’s been going for little girls, that means it’s very hungry. And desperate.”  
  
He sounds almost pitying.  
  
Jaskier tilts his head. “Wyverns typically soft on little girls?”  
  
Bluntly, Geralt answers, “Not enough meat on them to be worth killing.”  
  
And with that, he sets off, leaving Jaskier staring at an elk-shaped bloodstain on the ground.  
  
“The thing is, Roach,” Jaskier says after Geralt is long gone, “I’ve never actually seen a wyvern up close.”  
  
Trailing Geralt without Geralt noticing is a tall order. Jaskier’s sorry, suddenly, to have paid so little attention all those times Geralt went around sniffing blades of grass and staring at the air. Best guess, Geralt would have tried to lure the creature _away_ from the village and its surrounding farms, so Jaskier heads in that direction, looking for an opening in the trees, a meadow, anywhere large enough to accommodate an encounter with a huge, scaly, winged lizard beast.  
  
Failing that, he’ll just follow whatever sound a winged lizard beast makes when it’s being hacked to pieces.  
  
“If _I_ were a witcher, where would I lure the big, scary…”  
  
A hand grabs him roughly by the nape of the neck, and he freezes.  
  
“Geralt!”  
  
In seconds flat, Jaskier finds himself manhandled against the trunk of a very large tree, Geralt’s glowering visage looming over him.  
  
“Really?” Jaskier pouts. “I waited a _while_ after you’d left.”  
  
A muscle in Geralt’s jaw twitches dangerously. “I could smell you coming from half a mile off.”  
  
Jaskier makes a face. “Well.”  
  
“I _told_ you to stay back at the camp.”  
  
“You did, but—”  
  
Geralt makes a dark noise in his throat that sounds perilously close to a growl.  
  
“Oh, come on,” Jaskier says, heart beating a rapid staccato in his throat. Geralt’s arm feels like solid iron where it’s held across his chest, pinning him relentlessly in place. He doesn’t even try to struggle. Like getting caught in a bear trap, he thinks wildly, best to just stay still. Or so he’s heard. “When else am I going to get to see a wyvern fight up close? And aren’t you even a _little_ impressed I actually managed to find you?”  
  
Geralt bares his teeth, sounding like he’s biting off the words with painstaking care: “ _I_ found _you_.”  
  
“Right, well.” Jaskier manages to pat Geralt’s arm awkwardly. “I’m here now?”  
  
Overhead, as if on cue, the loud flapping of wings casts a shadow.  
  
They stare at each other for a single weighted moment that stretches.  
  
Jaskier blows out a breath. “Wait here, yes, got it,” and Geralt heaves himself violently away, heading towards a hill in the distance at a dead run. _High ground_ , Jaskier thinks, nodding to himself because it’s smart, and sags against the tree, limp as a ragdoll, feeling as though his bones may have turned to liquid.  
  
A high-pitched, whistling screech pierces the air. Then, from a long way off, the sound of a small, contained explosion.  
  
“Just a peek,” Jaskier promises in a loud whisper, already following in the direction Geralt ran. “Just a teeny, tiny peek, just the tiniest of glimpses, really—"  
  
He makes it to the top of the hill and sees, at last, a clearing. Down below, Geralt throws himself to the ground, rolling out of the way of a tail roughly the size of a small horse and decorated in glistening, coated spikes. He rights himself quickly, sprinting circles around the beast, seeming to anticipate every powerful swing of its tail with uncanny precision. He hurls himself to one side just as it crashes down onto the space where he was standing, then lobs something at the wyvern’s head, retreating half a moment before it explodes in a fiery starburst that makes the creature screech and stagger and claw the earth blindly.  
  
“Melitele’s _tits_ ,” Jaskier breathes, stunned.  
  
It’s easy for him to forget, sometimes, the parts of Geralt that aren’t entirely human. He remembers them now, watching Geralt bring the wyvern down with a carefully directed blast of force each time it attempts to retreat into the air before tearing into it with several pounds of folded steel. There’s a violent sort of poetry in the unforgiving arc of Geralt’s blade, the vengeful snap of the wyvern’s teeth missing Geralt’s head by centimeters. A heavy claw follows after, tearing into Geralt’s chest, and Jaskier watches, spellbound, as the witcher braces and absorbs a blow that would have knocked any ordinary man clean off his feet.  
  
The battle seems over nearly as soon as it’s begun. The creature’s shrieks are a continuous, cacophonous drone, rattling him to the teeth as it grows ever wilder and more desperate, Geralt heading off its every attempt at escape with a ruthlessness that sends violent shivers coursing down Jaskier’s spine.  
  
It's pure chance when the wyvern—hungry, desperate, all but ravaged—casts its gaze to the top of the hill just as the shimmering Sign of Quen bursts over the length and breadth of Geralt’s body, a single instant of warm, flashing gold like a sunbeam refracted, like the color of Geralt’s eyes in broad daylight. It beats its great bloodied wings once, twice, and ascends, Geralt crying out a moment too late, a force blast missing its mark by seconds as the wyvern uses every bit of its remaining strength to fly away from the source of its torment and toward the easiest source of food it can see.  
  
The hilltop is all but barren, bereft of any places to hide.  
  
“Shit,” Jaskier croaks, lunging down the hill toward Geralt on pure ungodly instinct, “ _shit_ , shit, _shit_ —"  
  
Above him, too close, the wyvern tears apart the air with a scream.  
  
“ _Jaskier_!”  
  
The last thing he knows is the sound of Geralt’s voice, and then—  
  
A wall of force, slamming into him.  
  
  
  
Awareness returns to him slowly, and then all at once.  
  
A cool, wet cloth dabbing at his forehead, the movements more practiced than they are tender. They pause at the sound of a hissing breath that Jaskier belatedly realizes might be his own. He’s lying on something hard—packed earth. Something is propping his head up. A sliver of light turns the dull ache in his temple into one great pulsing throb, and he groans, clamping his eyes tightly shut.  
  
Somewhere over him, Geralt sighs feelingly.  
  
“Jaskier.”  
  
“No,” Jaskier mutters. “Not here right now.”  
  
The nearby sound of water sloshing—and then, without warning, being dumped over his head.  
  
Jaskier bolts upright, spluttering.  
  
“ _What_ are you _doing_ ,” he demands, nearly keeling back over when the sudden movement makes the darkness behind his eyelids swim with spots of white. He opens his eyes, which is briefly _so much worse_ , and puts a clenched fist to his forehead just for something solid to lean against.  
  
“Checking for brain damage.” Geralt’s voice is devoid of even the tiniest trace of pity.  
  
Jaskier cracks one eye open to glare at him sideways. “That is _not_ how you do that.”  
  
It’s hard to tell from the angle, and from the pain making everything sort of wobble unforgivingly, whether Geralt smiles at that or frowns. Statistically, it’s probably the latter. Jaskier closes his eyes again, leaning back with a groan because he’d really like to return to being horizontal and, preferably, unconscious, but a strong, apprehending grip on the back of his neck keeps him upright.  
  
“Oh, come on,” he wails miserably and, needing _some_ solid point in the world, heaves himself stubbornly the other way, colliding with the great bulk of Geralt’s chest.  
  
The hand on his nape goes limp for an instant, then tenses, splayed fingers tightening around the base of his skull. For a moment Jaskier feels himself narrow down to that single point of contact—feels himself held entirely within the width of Geralt’s palm.  
  
He feels as much as hears the low rumbling of Geralt’s voice. “Stay awake, Jaskier.”  
  
“Right, sure,” Jaskier replies, oddly cotton-mouthed all of a sudden. Geralt smells like sweat and what he strongly suspects is no small amount of wyvern blood. Hardly something Jaskier would ever have thought to find comforting, but life is full of surprises. Still, he doesn’t know what Geralt’s talking about. Falling asleep right here seems like an excellent idea. “Being awake hurts.”  
  
“Promise you it hurts less than getting torn to pieces by a wyvern.”  
  
“That’s a horrible promise.” Jaskier turns his face, nose colliding with the dip at the base of Geralt’s throat. “Promise me something else.”  
  
“Jaskier,” Geralt exhales, a knot of tension in it. “I’m _angry_ with you.”  
  
“That wyvern was on its last leg,” Jaskier murmurs. “I had him.”  
  
“You had something,” Geralt answers, heated. “A death wish?”  
  
Jaskier blinks one eye open slowly, then closes it. “You’d be poor company if I did. You won’t let me die.”  
  
All at once, Geralt moves away. Unnatural, really, how fast he can move for so large a man. Or maybe it’s only that Jaskier is very, very much concussed. He catches himself—barely—on both hands, slumping forward in a graceless heap in the dirt, and listens to the sounds of Geralt stalking around in a fit of bad temper until Roach’s low whinnying compels him to look up.  
  
“Uh, Geralt?”  
  
Geralt is sitting astride his horse, eyes on the treeline. “Go back to the village.”  
  
Jaskier scrambles to his feet with a sharp noise of protest, dusting off his clothes. “What—really? Hey hey, _hang_ on, what are you doing?”  
  
“Not letting you die,” Geralt bites out, expression like a stone wall. He murmurs something too low for Jaskier’s ears, digs his heels lightly into Roach’s side, and together they break into a full gallop, leaving Jaskier alone in the woods with a lute and a pounding headache.  
  
Jaskier regards the scene in silence until Geralt and Roach are nothing but a dark blur in the distance.  
  
“That is _one_ method of keeping me awake,” he admits, grudging.  
  
  
  
It isn’t the first time he and Geralt have parted ways. After Cintra and that whole mess of a royal betrothal, he’d seen neither hide nor white hair of the witcher for the better part of five or six years, minus a short stint in Vizima involving an earl and an alghoul that went rather badly for everyone involved. Jaskier had returned to Oxenfurt for a year or two and remembers in hindsight only that it felt very small—a stark contrast to how it had seemed to him at sixteen, huge and brimming with possibility. What he’d told Geralt was in no small way the truth: he’d outgrown it.  
  
But the whole truth is somewhat more troubling, and it’s that that feeling is no longer tied to one place. Wherever Jaskier goes, it follows, leeching the color from things and begging him to outrun it.  
  
Lately, these are the moments when he notices it most: his days never feel more muddled than when Geralt leaves them.  
  
He makes it back to the village just as twilight is beginning to soften the sunburnt pinks in the sky to shades of indigo and violet. The tavern sounds livelier than it did that morning, and when he crosses the threshold, Jaskier garners a few immediately hostile looks. There are, notably, more of them now, and not just at the bar.  
  
Jaskier holds both arms out at his sides in the universal gesture for peace.  
  
“Your beast is dead,” he offers. A couple of patrons seated at the far end of the room move their shoulders as one, making to stand. Jaskier raises a single finger in the air. “ _And_ the witcher’s gone, which means it was done entirely free of charge. If you like, I can even lead you to the creature’s very hulking, very dead carcass in the morning.”  
  
There’s a pause.  
  
A voice in the back calls out. “What was it?”  
  
“A wyvern,” he replies brightly.  
  
Another voice says, “I _told_ you that’s what it was!” while yet another shouts, “What did it look like!”  
  
“Ah-ah. The deed was free,” Jaskier says. “The _story_ will cost you. Well, I did almost die, surely that’s at least worth a drink?”  
  
He glances at the figure behind the bar, a tall, thin woman with graying hair and a severe expression who blinks at him, unmoved.  
  
A hand reaches over, dropping a few copper pieces onto the pockmarked wood.  
  
“Oh don’t fret, Molly, I’ll cover it. Just give him his drink,” says a smooth voice.  
  
The figure to whom it belongs slides his stool out a little so that he’s clearly in Jaskier’s line of sight. He’s younger than Jaskier expects from the look of the other patrons sitting at the bar, which he assumes is a bit of an earned position one must volley for in a small village where greed is rarely harmless. The stranger turns his whole body, sitting sideways on the stool to face him, blue eyes sharply curious over a curling half-smile.  
  
Molly pours Jaskier a drink. She plunks it down on the countertop with enough force to be rude, but not enough to spill a single drop.  
  
“As I was saying,” Jaskier says with a gracious smile and takes a long pull from the tankard.  
  
By the third drink, Jaskier has earned a seat at one of the tables, and considerably fewer hostile glances. The young man buying his drinks keeps a measured distance until the moment Jaskier unveils his lute, at which point he slides into the seat next to Jaskier, its previous occupant vacating it seemingly at the behest of nothing but a pointed cerulean look. The people at the table, not satisfied with just one telling of the story, ask for it a second time, and he indulges them, feeling generous—only the second time his isn’t the only voice telling it. Others chime in, and he smiles at them, strumming at his lute lightly, the warm notes mingling kindly with the golden lamplight that softens their lean faces.  
  
He stills in his playing when a set of unfamiliar fingers teases uninvited over Jaskier’s on the strings.  
  
“Do you, uh, have a name there, strange man fingering my instrument all of a sudden?” he asks, peering at the figure sitting next to him.  
  
“Askel,” says the stranger.  
  
He picks at the lute strings without much reservation, the notes idle even if the look in his cool blue eyes is not. His hair is the color of burnished copper, pulled back from a face that’s angular and lean but not from hardship, and singular for that among the rest of them. He’s handsome. He’s eyeing Jaskier a little intently.  
  
“This is a beautiful instrument. Something so fine in a place like this—it’s a rare gift.”  
  
“Sturdier than it looks, too,” Jaskier says, then wonders immediately why he said it.  
  
Askel’s curling smile widens. “I was hoping it would be.”  
  
He flicks another two strings with the underside of a finger. Jaskier glances around their table and finds that his audience has otherwise largely dispersed.  
  
“It’s a good story, the wyvern. And it’ll make life easier here, for a while, now it’s gone. I would have liked to thank your companion in person for his services. Will he return for you?”  
  
Jaskier wants to look away but doesn’t. His expression feels uncomfortably unshielded.  
  
“No, I—” He swallows. “I suspect that’s the last Geralt and I will see of each other for a while. He had somewhere to go, and I…” He trails off, because _I have nowhere I need to be_ sounds a little less appealing after long months of companionship. “I made him angry.”  
  
That intent blue look sharpens. “You had a falling out?”  
  
“No, it’s—well. I make him angry all the time, I think, but this was worse. He told me to do something and I did the opposite. Which happens more often than is probably smart, considering he’s a witcher, and knows things, and I’m… _but_ you know, sometimes it’s like he doesn’t know anything at all! It’s a puzzling duality. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he adds, laughing a little.  
  
Askel’s voice is almost warm, just a shade off, when he says, “Most people find me easy to talk to.”  
  
Jaskier smiles. “I’m beginning to see that. I’m Jaskier, by the way. I asked for your name and never gave you mine.”  
  
“Jaskier.” He seems to weigh it in his mouth, considering. “A lot of people say names matter. Calling things and people what they are. Some call your witcher friend a monster.”  
  
Jaskier’s smile slips a little. “Do you?”  
  
Askel looks thoughtful. The angles of his face catch the lamplight as he ducks his head, and it’s kind to every single one. “I think you could argue it’s a matter of perspective. Maybe everyone is a monster to someone.” Jaskier’s brows hitch upward, questioning. Askel ignores it. “Do you know what I think your monster is right now?”  
  
“’What’?” Jaskier repeats. “Not who?”  
  
“Sometimes the what is a feeling,” says Askel. “And sometimes a feeling is as powerful as any monster of flesh and blood.”  
  
Askel’s fingers have stilled entirely on Jaskier’s lute. They remain poised on the strings, just barely touching. For a moment, Jaskier notices how quiet it’s become in the tavern without Askel’s discordant, aimless plucking, but the awareness of it passes almost as quickly as it occurs to him, narrowing down to the soft timbre of Askel’s voice.  
  
“And what is it you think I’m feeling?” Jaskier asks.  
  
“Lonely,” Askel says, and kisses him.  
  
It's innocent for all of a single breath. And then _heat_ punches Jaskier in the pit of his stomach with a ferocity that almost makes him cry out. His fingers go limp on the lute and then clutch at one of Askel’s arms, the weight of the instrument replaced suddenly and without ceremony as Askel closes the distance between them. He kisses Jaskier hungrily, devouringly, but also as though he _really_ knows how, the sort of finesse Jaskier rarely finds in passion and invariably envies when he does. He catches Jaskier’s bottom lip in his teeth and then tongues hotly at the seam of Jaskier’s lips until he opens, gasping a low, wanting moan into Askel’s mouth.  
  
“Maybe we should,” Jaskier pants, suddenly very aware that Askel has hooked a leg over Jaskier’s lap and is all but attempting to climb him, “continue… somewhere else, _fuck_ , anywhere else.” Askel’s hands tangle in Jaskier’s hair, pulling lightly. “Somewhere— _alone_.”  
  
“My dear Jaskier,” Askel says, and there’s almost something crooning in it. “We are alone.”  
  
Jaskier glances around the empty room.  
  
“Where did they… _fuck_ , you are good at that,” he mutters as Askel bites a trail of hot, sucking kisses down his throat. “Where did everyone go?”  
  
Askel’s tongue is hot on the shell of Jaskier’s ear.  
  
“Would you rather they stayed?” A nip of teeth, sharp. “Do you prefer to have people watch?”  
  
Something about the way Askel’s voice rings in his ear has Jaskier considering it. The thought has barely settled in his mind when Askel hooks deft fingers around his jaw, angling Jaskier’s gaze to the window on the far side of the tavern.  
  
The light is just low enough to afford him a glimpse of what lies on the other side in the pitch dark: the man from the bar this morning who spat at him, staring. At the other window he sees Molly, her face even gaunter in the shadows.  
  
Jaskier’s heart flips over in his chest.  
  
“Nope! Nope, _nooo_ , do _not_ like that, what the _fuck_ are they—" He scrambles a bit in his chair. “Nope, no, I _know_ this feeling, that is a _creepy_ feeling—"  
  
“Hush,” Askel murmurs in his ear, in that same nearly crooning sort of voice. “It’s alright. They’re gone. Pretend they were never there.”  
  
Jaskier blinks at the empty window. The long, lean line of Askel’s body arches against him, fingernails scratching over Jaskier’s scalp, and the cold pit in Jaskier’s belly dissipates utterly at the hot slide of Askel’s mouth over his own. There’s a phantom of unease and then nothing like unease at all: it all dissolves into heat, and hunger.  
  
Askel places a hand on his throat and flexes it lightly. “Jaskier, I’d like to have you.”  
  
“Yes,” Jaskier agrees enthusiastically. “I mean, do. Have me.” He tilts his face up at Askel and smiles. “Have me in any way you like.”  
  
“Oh,” Askel breathes against his mouth, nearly purring. His darkened eyes are a promise. “You are a lovely thing.”  
  
He wakes in the morning with a trail of livid purple love bites on his ribs and an ache threatening to split his head in two. He remembers a violent sort of lovemaking and little else, remembers being an enthusiastic participant _in_ said lovemaking. But every time he tries to recollect wayward pieces of the conversation that led up to it, a sort of dull ache fills his skull, drowning and scattering his thoughts.  
  
Downstairs in the tavern, Molly’s scrubbing a dirty rag over the tables with a sour look.  
  
“It’s not my place to question what you put in the ale here, Molly,” he says, scrubbing at his forehead, “but do you water it down with poisoned well water, by chance?”  
  
She glares at him. “Don’t push your luck here, bard.”  
  
“No, no,” he laughs. “Of course not. Wouldn’t dream of pushing. You haven’t seen Askel around, have you?”  
  
“The traveler?” Almost imperceptibly, she softens. “He left early this morning.”  
  
“Traveler,” Jaskier repeats.  
  
“It’s not for me to tell you his business,” Molly says with an uncharitable amount of side-eyeing, dunking her rag into a bucket and wringing it out in her roughened hands. “He comes and goes as he pleases. But he’s been a great help to our village. We were in dire straits without him.”  
  
Jaskier diplomatically does not point out that they seem to be in rather dire straits now.  
  
It takes all day for the pounding in his head to let up even slightly. That’s why he stays, he tells himself, not because whenever his thoughts stray toward leaving all he can think about are Askel’s hands on his throat. He wanders around the village with a tense knot in his stomach that grows tighter the closer it gets to nightfall. When Askel steps into the tavern at dusk, Jaskier feels drenched in relief.  
  
“Hello,” Askel says with a smooth smile, looking wholly unsurprised to see him.  
  
The knot in Jaskier’s stomach pulls taut.  
  
“You fuck like a demon,” Jaskier says.  
  
Askel laughs, his cool blue eyes thawing.  
  
“Fortunately, your instrument is sturdier than it looks.” He tilts his head. A shock of copper hair falls loose from its tie, brushing the proud angle of his jaw. Jaskier swallows, desire clawing at him blindly. “Play something for us.”  
  
Jaskier does. He plays until his fingers have grown tired on his lute strings, his voice hoarse with singing, that ugly knot of tension building underneath the weight of those imperturbable blue eyes that watch him until the music stops. Then Askel takes Jaskier to his room and undresses him, laying him down on soft sheets, kissing him until Jaskier is trembling and raw with wanting.  
  
It’s the same the next night, and the one after.  
  
It is altogether a more pleasant situation than most Jaskier’s found himself in, lately, the headaches notwithstanding.  
  
Occasionally Jaskier peruses the village notice board and thinks of Geralt. A scrawled note from the farrier’s wife bemoans the fact that she keeps waking up in the middle of the night to burn her clothes, then, in the morning, has no memory of why she did so. The butcher hasn’t been to the tavern in over a month because every time he tries to go there of evenings after he’s closed up shop, he forgets where it is. The blacksmith keeps melting down all of her silver and burying it in the ground; when she goes to dig it back up, she says, it’s all disappeared.  
  
Strange problems for a little village.  
  
“ _Alas, said poor Annie, I’ve done it once more,_ ” Jaskier sings lightly, strumming a chord, “ _my favorite smock lies there, charred on the floor_.” He smiles, setting down his lute. It’s only just approaching nightfall, but he’s so tired his bones ache. “Doesn’t quite compare to the others, does it?”  
  
Askel gazes at him keenly. “Do you miss your adventures?”  
  
“I miss parts of them.”  
  
“Don’t,” says Askel, stroking Jaskier’s cheek. Jaskier leans into it, the seemingly ever-present knot in his chest loosening. “What else troubles you? Tell me.”  
  
“I don’t know,” Jaskier says honestly. “I’m so tired lately. When I think of all Geralt and I used to travel in a month’s time, I wonder how I ever kept up with him.”  
  
“You’ve earned rest, Jaskier,” Askel says kindly.  
  
“Rest,” Jaskier repeats, the corner of his mouth hitching down. “Maybe. It isn’t the adventures, you know, that I miss so much. It’s that there’s a—” He pauses, unsure how to say it, never having settled on a name for the feeling he outruns. It feels blunted. Like a poem he only half remembers. “There’s a clarity,” he decides, “that I feel when I’m with Geralt, that I feel nowhere and with no one else.”  
  
It's a vulnerable admission. Even here, in this small room and small bed and even smaller village, with this beautiful man who’s been good to him. Askel’s eyes are nearly all pupil, ringed with a thin shock of almost iridescent blue. Lately it feels like the only color Jaskier knows. He slides a hand down Jaskier’s chest and curls it around his hip, the slightest hint of possession in it.  
  
“Forget Geralt of Rivia,” says Askel.  
  
In the morning, Jaskier gazes out the window and tries to remember how long ago it was that he came here. He puts it together piecemeal over the course of the long, dragging day, head roaring with an ache that won’t relent. By the end of it, the blanks outnumber the few certainties, upsetting the whole. It tips over onto its side like a spinning wheel that’s lost momentum. The further back he digs, the heavier it becomes: he cannot lift it. His memory is pockmarked by absence.  
  
He picks up his lute by the fire that night and strums something that sounds very much like a song, only he can’t think of the words; the ones in his mouth aren’t the right ones.  
  
  
  
The passage of time becomes considerably less distinct.  
  
Jaskier falls decidedly ill with something that feels like a very bad, very long hangover. Askel tends to him, bringing him bowls of warm broth Jaskier can do little to stomach. At night Jaskier feels hot all over as though with fever, and Askel tends to him then, too, kissing him long and slow into the bedding, by now knowing all the ways Jaskier likes to be touched. Even rundown as he is, all it takes is a kiss for Jaskier to feel that same hunger clawing at him, as voracious as the first night and all the nights thereafter. But the mornings grow more difficult, and he rouses but slowly, the thoughts in his head lacking edges to separate one from the other as the days wear on. He is swimming, but too tired to swim, too heavy to float.  
  
Then one day, one very long day and long night, Askel doesn’t come to him.  
  
Dawn breaks. Jaskier sits up in the bed for the first time in longer than he can remember. Since the sickness, probably, and how long ago was that? He looks down at himself, naked and tangled in a nest of blankets that smell of little but sweat and musk, and tries to remember the last time he’d _bathed_.  
  
He stands, dressing himself on wobbly legs. He ventures downstairs to ask after the possibility of a proper bath but finds the tavern empty. Usually Molly would be puttering around by now, wiping down spills from the night before. Tankards have been left on the bartop and on the low tables. Jaskier swills a few of them around and finds most of them half full.  
  
Outside, the day is clear, the sun shining brightly over the long grasses and thatched roofs of the village. Not a single door or shop front is open. Chickens graze idly, picking at weeds. The three pack horses in the little stall by the farrier’s place kick impatiently at the dirt, waiting to be let out into the pasture. The forge is utterly silent, devoid of the sound of clanging metal and steel. By the look of it, there isn’t a single human soul awake at all, except for him.  
  
“Alright, I’m going to go ahead and call this the special kind of weird,” Jaskier says to himself, combing slowly through the village. He isn’t certain how he knows that there are levels of weird at all, but it's there in his brain, an entire hierarchy of strange. “I feel like somebody’s doused me in cold water all of a sudden, where _is_ everyone? Have _you_ seen them?” He frowns accusingly at a passing hen, who clucks at him. “No? Maybe I’ll have a little look-see in here, d'you think?”  
  
He picks a small house at random, pushes open the unlatched door. No fire in the meager hearth, no bread baking over it, no bodies in the two little pallets at the back.  
  
Jaskier frowns, ducking back out again and squinting up at the sky. “If I were an entire… village… where would I hide? Why would everyone just—”  
  
He stops dead in his tracks, staring down the dirt road.  
  
“ _Roach_?”  
  
He breaks into a run.  
  
Roach is grazing by a few stacked barrels, the lines of her lean and strong and glistening faintly as though she’d been ridden very far, very fast. She snorts at his approach, lifting her head to knock his shoulder gently as his hands stroke the sides of her long neck.  
  
The world sharpens unforgivingly around him in a single instant that leaves Jaskier breathless and off-balance. He feels suddenly as though he’s missed a step on a very long staircase and stumbled.  
  
“Where’s—?” He peers at her strangely. The thought gathers and fades like mist, pain lancing through his skull even as his heart kicks fast in warning. “Hello. You’re—you’re alone.”  
  
“She isn’t,” says a voice, and Jaskier spins on his heel.  
  
And nearly topples over.  
  
“… _Geralt_.”  
  
Color floods back into the world.  
  
He moves so quickly he nearly trips over his own feet. Geralt palms the back of Jaskier’s neck with an expression of naked relief that warms Jaskier from the inside. He looks tired and on edge, his golden eyes studying him piercingly, every inch of his face suddenly and desperately familiar.  
  
Jaskier lets out a shocky little breath as every thought in his head realigns in a way that feels like returning.  
  
“Geralt.” His voice chokes on it. He smiles helplessly. “You came back. It’s been—how long as it been?”  
  
“Six days,” says Geralt. He strokes a thumb over the skin at Jaskier’s nape. Jaskier feels it in his throat, a pressure. Geralt lowers his voice urgently, grip tightening. “Jaskier, the mage. He’s here.”  
  
Jaskier blinks at him. “He’s—sorry, the what? He’s what?”  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
“Yes, I’m—” He fumbles. Geralt is palming the side of his face with a fierce sort of tenderness. “I’m fine, I’m just—my head is _pounding_. And my bones feel a bit like jelly. And everyone’s _gone_ , have you noticed we appear to be standing in the middle of a ghost town, and I’m—it's really only been six days?” Emotion stretches his voice thin. “Because I’m seeing you and feel a little bit like crying.”  
  
“How touching,” says Askel’s voice.  
  
Geralt’s arms snap to his sides, and the look on his face goes mutinous with cold rage.  
  
Jaskier turns in place. Seated on one of the barrels just above Roach’s grazing head, Askel gazes at him, his usual curling smile a little sour with something like real displeasure. He’s dressed from head to toe in black, unlike the usual muted browns he’s always worn, every inch of him savagely beautiful.  
  
For an instant, Jaskier recoils at it.  
  
“I don’t understand,” Jaskier says.  
  
“ _He’s_ the mage.” Geralt grinds the words out with difficulty, as though he’s trying to speak through a chokehold. Jaskier gapes at Askel as his smile widens, which, for the first time, makes him look deeply unpleasant. Geralt’s voice is an angry, low rasp. “And I know what else you are, _demon_.”  
  
“Half demon, if you please. Sins of the mother, and all that.”  
  
“What do you mean _demon_?” Jaskier squawks.  
  
“Desire demon,” Geralt spits. “If I wasn’t sure before, I’d know it from the smell.”  
  
Askel tilts his head down at Jaskier benevolently. “He means you.”  
  
Jaskier splutters. “Alright, _hang_ on—"  
  
“I’d meant to feed on you slowly, if that makes any difference. The intent was to make you last for a while. You aren’t much to look at, but your spirit is… delectable.”  
  
“Are you—are you _actually_ _insulting_ me after telling me you’ve been feeding on my, what, my _soul_?” Jaskier puts both hands on his hips, overcome with a sense of outrage. To lie with someone while plotting their inevitable demise, it’s just—it’s beyond the pale. “This _whole time_? You were… _and_ we… and _I_.” He pulls a face, remembering. His governess would have a fit. “And after you were done with me and there was no soul left, then what, hm? Then I suppose you were just going to haul my lifeless body off… and… “  
  
“Throw it down a well?” Geralt bites out. “Yeah, I made that leap, too.”  
  
Jaskier gapes at him uselessly. “ _You’re_ the murderer.”  
  
“Well done.” Askel crosses his legs from atop his perch and leans forward, smiling like a teacher at his favorite pupil.  
  
Jaskier scowls. “You know, I don’t even think I like you.”  
  
“I don’t create desire, Jaskier,” Askel says, rolling his eyes. “I simply use it. Who knows? Perhaps you and I aren’t finished yet. I made you forget your friend once. I can do it again.”  
  
Geralt growls, low and menacing. “I’ll _kill_ you before you touch him again.”  
  
“And you, witcher.” Askel’s expression grows stony. “I suppose you’d like to drag me back off to the Academy.”  
  
Every tendon in Geralt’s neck stands out starkly, his pale skin sheened with a layer of sweat. Whatever magic Askel’s using to hold him in place, it’s powerful. Geralt bares his teeth. “Afraid of a little discipline? They said you threw a glorified tantrum and left. You’ve been leaving a trail of bodies through the north ever since.”  
  
“They’ll say whatever it takes to manipulate you into doing what they want,” Askel says sharply, the light in his eyes far colder than Jaskier’s ever seen it. “When they couldn’t control me, they tried to cage me. When they couldn’t cage me, they tried to have me killed. There’s not a creature or thing they won’t exploit if they can. Ban Ard, Aretuza, they’re all the same. They’re all afraid of anything that threatens to break the mold. I could have been a _boon_ to them.”  
  
“It’s not mage politics I care about,” says Geralt. His shoulders are heaving with his breaths. He’s fighting hard.  
  
“I know what you care about, Geralt of Rivia.” Askel’s eyes narrow, a laughing kind of cruelty in them. “I can’t move your feelings around as I’d like, but I can see them.” He straightens and jumps down, landing gracefully on his feet. Jaskier takes a step back, toward Geralt. “Though they’re a bit tawdry. Anger, pain, a deep well of loneliness. More than enough self-loathing to make one wonder. Here I thought witchers were supposed to be inhuman.” He sounds scornful. “You’re really just like everyone else.”  
  
Geralt’s arm jerks. The look on Askel’s face goes unsmiling and intent, his blue eyes flashing, and Geralt stills again.  
  
“Ah, but your spirit.” Askel gazes at him with an expression of open longing. “You want so much, yet afford yourself so little. I would make a _feast_ out of you.”  
  
“Jaskier,” Geralt rasps, “run.”  
  
“Are you out of your mind?” Jaskier snaps.  
  
“Do what I tell you _for once_ and _run._ ”  
  
“On the contrary,” says Askel, tone placid even though the lines of his face are beginning grow tight with strain. “I think he’s going to do what _I_ tell him. Jaskier, take the knife from Geralt’s belt.”  
  
Jaskier takes the knife.   
  
Calmly, Askel says, “Slit his throat.”  
  
Jaskier gives a start. He raises the knife, his hand very steady. There’s no pounding in his head. There is only a blooming sense of clarity and Geralt beside him, his golden eyes falling shut, sweat beading at his hairline in the late morning sun as he strains against the magic with his entire body.  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, Jaskier sees Geralt’s fingers at his sides just faintly twitching.  
  
He takes a deep breath, palms the knife in his hand, and throws it.  
  
Askel hisses, dodging out of the way. Geralt lets out a low roar of a scream and throws out a hand, lighting up the ground with a bright circle of flashing violet right where Askel is standing. The mage’s face contorts with an alien fury, lips parting around bared teeth, but Geralt’s sign slows him. It’s just enough to afford Geralt the moment it takes to arc a bomb neatly into the circle, his other hand flying to his silver sword as the dimeritium explodes in a blinding burst of sickly emerald.  
  
“ _Now_ will you run—”  
  
“Al _right_!”  
  
Jaskier turns tail and runs straight into a gathered mob.  
  
The villagers gaze back at him, expressions hard in their lean faces. They’re clutching shears and shovels and pitchforks, and they all appear decidedly unfriendly.  
  
Jaskier puts both hands on his hips, feeling very tired all of a sudden. He nods at a particularly nasty poker, its iron tip blazing a hot, molten gold.  
  
Conversationally, he asks, “Would you believe me if I said this is not the first time this has happened?”  
  
Molly raises a very mean-looking meat cleaver at him menacingly.  
  
“I know you never liked me much,” Jaskier acknowledges, and breaks into a full sprint.  
  
The villagers give chase. Jaskier prays wildly to whatever god might be listening that Geralt will handle the situation before he has to do something horrible like break a barrel over poor Annie’s head.  
  
“I know a seamstress in Toussaint!” Jaskier yells at her over his shoulder. “She’ll make you anything you like, at cost! I’ll deliver it to you personally, as many frocks in as many colors as you—Lilvani’s holy _cunt_ , will you people stop running with pitchforks just because a very bad man told you to!”  
  
He leaps over a fence, lands in what he’s pretty sure is horse shit, and keeps running. The thatch roof houses thin out into farmland, meaning fewer obstacles for him as well as the mob. He briefly considers throwing a goat at them, nearing the edge of his endurance only minutes in. He’s unsure how long he’d spent lying in bed sipping at broth while a beautiful man sucked his soul out through his cock, _literally_ , but he feels the effects of that time in the inexorable slowing of his step, in his calves going all wobbly. He gets clumsy, tripping over a rock and stumbling, and hopes furiously that this is not the way he goes. For one thing, nobody would get the damn story right.  
  
Then the sound of heavy footfalls behind him ceases altogether, and the only thing he can hear are his own heaving breaths.  
  
He turns, bracing both hands on the screaming muscles of his thighs.  
  
The villagers have all stopped next to an overturned horse cart. They’re staring at him as one with identical expressions of earnest puzzlement.  
  
“Are you all feeling,” Jaskier pants, “a little less murderous now?”  
  
The butcher drops his bone saw. “Who the hell are you?”  
  
“Oh thank fuck,” Jaskier says, and collapses.  
  
  
  
He wakes up in a bed in a windowless room. There’s a bath drawn and steaming in a great wooden tub in the corner. Clothes are laid out for him at the foot of the bed, and his lute. Below that, on a little stool, there’s a plate of hard cheeses, rough cuts of bread, and dried meat. Jaskier’s stomach gives a pointed growl.  
  
He devours the food. He strips out of his clothes and sinks gratefully into the bath, every muscle in his body tensing before giving over, a low moan spilling forth from Jaskier’s lips as he declares, “This is better than sex. This is one hundred thousand times _so_ _much_ _better_ than _any sex_.”  
  
“Glad to hear it.”  
  
Jaskier opens his eyes.  
  
Geralt leans against the doorway, the slightest hint of a smile softening his usually severe angles.  
  
“Look at you, you’re actually happy to see me,” Jaskier says, and sinks into the water up to his shoulders.  
  
There’s no heat in it, but the curve of Geralt’s mouth catches against something unpleasant all the same. He enters the room and closes the door, then looks almost uncertain as to whether or not he belongs on this side.  
  
“Are you alright?” Jaskier squints at him through the clouds of steam rising from the bath. “Because you look a bit lost. It’s a strange look on you, I have to say.” He frowns. “You _are_ Geralt, aren’t you? This isn’t some sort of—only I’ve had my mind tossed about and played in quite enough for one week, so if you _aren’t_ Geralt, kindly just—”  
  
“Jaskier.” Geralt sounds exasperated. “It’s me.”  
  
Jaskier peers at him narrowly. “Mm. Just what a fake Geralt would say.”  
  
He's expecting a sigh or an eyeroll, but if anything, Geralt just looks even more tense and unhappy.  
  
“Oh, stop that,” Jaskier says, relaxing against the edge of the tub. “I’m only trying to lighten the mood. Though, just for fun, tell me something only the real Geralt would say. You don’t say very much, so you aren’t spoiled for choice here, but try. Something like: _Damn it, Jaskier. Jaskier, you idiot_. Or: _Jaskier, if you don’t put that lute away, I’m going to feed it to a barghest_. Feel free to chime in before I run through them all—”  
  
“I’m sorry,” says Geralt.  
  
Jaskier blinks. “No, that doesn’t sound like you at all.”  
  
Geralt squares his shoulders like he’s come to a decision, then crosses the length of the room to kneel beside the wooden tub. He’s unarmored, black shirt hanging open at his throat. His brow is furrowed, mouth tight with some misery, but the look in his golden eyes is unflinching.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, jaw clenching. “I told you to come back to the village.”  
  
“Don’t be stupid,” Jaskier says, taken aback by the intensity with which Geralt is staring at him. He’s caught between the urge to duck away from it and a heady sort of pleasure at being pinned beneath that unrelenting gaze. “I mean, you did leave me stranded in the woods, alone and concussed, but the murderous half-incubus mage part, well—” He waves his fingers a little, splashing. “You couldn’t have known.”  
  
Geralt lets out a harsh breath through his nose. “ _Jaskier_.”  
  
Jaskier leans forward, something twisting in his chest when Geralt bows his head. He moves closer, dangling an arm over the edge of the tub. He touches the side of Geralt’s face with two wet fingers, tentative, and drops them.  
  
“How did you know to come back?” he asks.  
  
“I searched the well,” Geralt says without looking up. “Didn’t find much, but the stench was… inhuman. Not animal either. Then I found a village three days’ ride northeast of here, like this one. Bodies turning up in an old mining shaft as recently as two months ago. The same stench over every inch.”  
  
“Oh. That’d be the special kind of weird, then,” Jaskier says softly.  
  
Geralt frowns. “Half a dozen people left in the village, not one of them able to tell me how it happened. Even when I compelled them, it was as though there were holes in their memories. Hours, even days stripped away.”  
  
In spite of the heat of the bath, Jaskier shivers. And maybe it’s the sight of Geralt’s bowed head or the wretched set of his shoulders that lends it all the air of some kind of confessional, because he’d meant to bury this one truth. It feels selfish now to keep it, and then again not like anything he wants to keep at all.  
  
Jaskier gazes at him and says, “He made me forget you.”  
  
Geralt shakes his head. “If it weren’t for the method, that might not be such a bad thing.”  
  
“Oh.” Jaskier pulls his arm back into the tub very quickly. “What an extremely thoughtless thing to say. And fuck _you_ very much.”  
  
Geralt looks up at the change in Jaskier’s voice, which has gone icily cold. Jaskier can’t remember ever feeling angrier with Geralt than he feels right at this moment and makes no move to soften it, glaring around the sudden rabbiting of his heart. Geralt has the nerve to look self-righteous and repentant all in the space of the same breath, but whatever it is he wants to say next, he bites back, shaking his head again.  
  
“Yes, that’s smart,” Jaskier says, furious. “Because if you keep going down that road, I really will slit your throat.”  
  
Geralt seems brought up short by that, suddenly. The righteousness goes out of him all at once, and he just looks sort of miserable again. It’s tiresome when Jaskier really just wants to hate him for half a moment in peace.  
  
“I thought maybe you would,” Geralt says.  
  
“Is _this_ how this conversation is going to be?” Jaskier wants to put more distance between them, but he’s almost too shocked to move. Geralt isn’t exactly known for his tact at the best of times, but this coarseness lacks precedent. “First you’re going to belittle my trauma by saying oh actually, Jaskier, it wouldn’t be so bad, and then you’re going to cast aspersions on my _character_ by implying I’d—"  
  
Geralt closes his eyes. “It’s how a desire demon works.”  
  
“I know how a desire demon works, thank you! Really very familiar with that by now.”  
  
“No, I mean—” Geralt grimaces, groaning low in frustration. “That’s not what I mean. They can’t—fabricate something that isn’t there. Feelings, desires. They draw them out, use them, feed on them. Turn them against you. But they can’t create wanting out of nothing.”  
  
Jaskier’s following, really he is, only he can’t for the life of him figure out what it is about what Geralt’s saying that’s making him look so anguished. He’s also not entirely sure he even cares.  
  
“A creature like that will take even the smallest kernel of desire,” Geralt continues, pinning Jaskier with that same intense stare, “and stretch it until it’s the only thing you can feel, or have ever felt. Something so small you’d hardly need know you’d ever harbored it. Mothers have drowned babies, or left them in fields. Lovers have—”  
  
He cuts himself off, casting his gaze to the floor.  
  
Jaskier peers at him strangely. It’s almost like Geralt is saying most of what he wants to say but leaving one very big thing out. It’s in the hunted set of his shoulders, the line of his frowning mouth that keeps tensing. _Slit his throat_. He remembers the words, remembers the weight of the knife in his hand and the sight of Geralt’s eyes closing, fighting the hold of Askel’s magic as though his very life depended on it.  
  
He blows out a breath.  
  
“You are really stupid sometimes,” Jaskier says, reaching over the edge of the bath to take Geralt’s face in both hands. They drip bath water onto the floor where Geralt is kneeling. The tight, angry feeling in his chest loosens and comes apart. He meets Geralt’s eyes, which stare back at him, golden and unguarded. “I could never want to hurt you. I told you that weeks ago. Weren’t you listening?”  
  
Geralt’s lips part soundlessly.  
  
“I’m going to finish my bath,” Jaskier says. “You have absolutely no idea how badly I need it.”  
  
Geralt’s expression darkens. “Yes, I do. He’s all I can smell on you.”  
  
Jaskier blinks, a little startled by the violent edge in Geralt’s tone. But Geralt is that, too: the softer sides, and the hard ones.  
  
He pushes away from the side of the tub and smiles. “Then go fetch me whatever passes for soap in this place.”  
  
Geralt leaves and does as he’s told, returning to the room not long after with soap and some pleasantly fragrant oils.  
  
“They like me better now, I think,” is all Geralt grunts by way of explanation.  
  
Jaskier pours a liberal amount of oil into his palm. He hesitates for a long moment before asking, “What did you do with him?”  
  
Geralt looks at him squarely. “Threw his body down a well,” he says, blunt. “Kept the head.”  
  
_Like a common trophy_ , Jaskier thinks, and frowns a little.  
  
“That’s a bit… gruesome, isn’t it?”  
  
“He was going to kill you.”  
  
The truth of it is unforgiving. The knife point in Geralt’s voice is even less forgiving than that.  
  
Jaskier finishes his bath. Geralt doesn’t leave to give him privacy, and Jaskier doesn’t think to ask him to, far more used to washing in Geralt’s presence than out of it, at this point. He isn’t used to Geralt watching him so much, though. The awareness of it pricks heat at the back of his neck and along his spine. By the end of it he’s exhausted, and sends Geralt away for more food, slipping into the change of clothes laid out for him—his own, but simple ones, a muted green shirt with only a little bit of brocade along the sleeves and a pair of soft, dark trousers.  
  
“I think this might be field mouse,” Jaskier says around a mouthful of stew, and eats until the bowl is empty. Then he looks at Geralt and says, “I’m going to sleep now,” feeling more sated than he has in days.  
  
“Alright,” Geralt says, and walks over to the now cold bath, and strips.  
  
A controlled burst of flame from Geralt’s hand has the water newly steaming. He steps into it more delicately than any man of that size should, and Jaskier should probably look away. There’s a mundane sort of intimacy in watching anyone go through the motions of bathing, but the mundane always sits a little differently on Geralt than it does on anyone else, and Jaskier, emboldened by the memory of Geralt’s gaze hot on the back of his neck, stares at Geralt the entire time, transfixed. He tries to think of a word to put to the utilitarian passes Geralt makes under his arms with the soap, the banality of Geralt’s fingers scrubbing the grime from his hairline. It’s almost transgressive—or more likely the transgression is that Jaskier’s watching. It makes his throat hurt.  
  
“Geralt,” says Jaskier.  
  
Geralt’s movements don’t falter. “I thought you were sleeping.”  
  
“You know damn well I’m not,” Jaskier rebukes, and the corner of Geralt’s mouth lifts faintly. “Why’d you tell me witchers could read minds?”  
  
Geralt says nothing for several minutes. “I also told you they can’t.”  
  
Annoyed, Jaskier says, “Geralt.”  
  
Geralt turns his face slightly, not quite looking at him head on. He cups a handful of soapy water in both palms and washes his face with it. It drips down the chiseled angle of his jaw for a long moment as he considers, then says, voice low, “I wanted to know if it was simple.”  
  
“If what was simple?”  
  
“What you wanted.”  
  
Jaskier sits up, frowning. “You’ve never even asked me what I wanted. And what does that mean, anyway, _simple_?”  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Geralt says. “It isn’t.”  
  
“Oh no, no, no,” Jaskier argues, incensed. “No, hang on, you don’t get to put a pin in that conversation just because you’ve come to some backwards conclusion through methods that are _questionable at best_. You really are a complete bastard sometimes, you know that?”  
  
“Hm.”  
  
Jaskier glances a heartfelt appeal to the dark wooden rafters in the ceiling, remembering how not even an hour ago he’d felt almost at peace for the first time in a week.  
  
With a sound of sloshing water, Geralt emerges from the bath. Jaskier’s gaze refocuses, following the path of water sluicing down one pale, scarred calf onto the floorboards. He swallows hard, and looks away.  
  
“Look,” he says, staring at his hands. “I’ve come far enough to realize that maybe I don’t know all of what I want all the time. But I get closer to knowing it with you. I don’t know how simple that is. It feels simple, sometimes.”  
  
In his periphery, he sees Geralt pause for a long moment, unmoving. Then Geralt sighs, bending toward the dark pile of his clothes on the floor.  
  
“Wait,” says Jaskier, and Geralt does. “It’s just that I think I know you, sometimes, and then you make me angry, and I forget.”  
  
Jaskier climbs out of the bed. He pads over to where a small puddle of bath water is gathering at Geralt’s feet. They’re nearly of a height; it always shocks him, a little, when he notices. Geralt is broader and thicker and bends the world around him whether he wants to or not, but Jaskier merely has to tilt his chin up a fraction to meet his eyes.  
  
“Do you want to know what it was like to forget you?” The corner of Jaskier’s mouth pulls into something complicated. “It was like putting my hand into an open flame and not being able to feel that it hurt me.”  
  
Geralt’s nostrils flare on an indrawn breath. He opens his mouth, then closes it abruptly when Jaskier lays an open hand on his chest, right over his slow-beating heart.  
  
“Here’s something simple,” Jaskier continues, tapping a finger against a scar. “I think one day, they’re probably going to say that the most important thing about my life was that I was your friend. And I’ll be glad when they say it, Geralt. I intend to keep them saying it for a long time.”  
  
Geralt’s expression twists.  
  
Jaskier says, “That’s what I want.”  
  
“It’s not all you want.”  
  
It hangs in the air for a moment.  
  
“No, but you already know that, don’t you?” Jaskier’s lips curve faintly, then hitch down. “You knew it in Kerwald.”  
  
“You left, in Kerwald.”  
  
Jaskier glares. “Oh, _excuse_ me for being the tiniest bit mortified at the idea of you peering into my head at every waking moment, then having to recalibrate my world view just as quickly because it was only your idea of a joke. Are you insane? _Simple_ , he says.”  
  
“I didn’t think—” Geralt says, repentant.  
  
“No, you really didn’t.”  
  
The line of Geralt’s jaw softens minutely as though he’d been clenching it.  
  
“I knew before Kerwald.”  
  
Jaskier swallows, staring at his hand splayed over Geralt’s chest. “Well, don’t leave me in suspense. Or would you rather we continue to dance around it?”  
  
“I don’t dance. You know I don’t dance.”  
  
“And yet,” Jaskier says softly. “Or don’t you, with men?”  
  
Geralt inhales deeply. It sways him the tiniest fraction closer. Jaskier looks up to meet his eyes, and there’s heat in them, unmistakable. It makes something clench in his chest.  
  
“It’s not that I don’t, with men. You’re just—” He cuts himself off, looking hunted.  
  
“A friend?”  
  
“ _Young_.”  
  
“Oh.” Jaskier blinks, caught off guard. “Really? That’s the most patronizing thing I’ve ever heard.”  
  
Geralt glares, which just makes him look a bit feral. His normally austere visage is juggling about three different expressions, and Jaskier can’t help but laugh at it softly, endeared.  
  
“Geralt, I’m hardly young. I’m thirty-four.” He makes a face, thoughtful, and lowers his voice. “I was young when we _met_. Mind you, I still wanted to fuck you within the hour—"  
  
Geralt groans, low. Jaskier feels it against his palm.  
  
Softly, Jaskier says, “You’re going to tell me you knew then, too.”  
  
“I knew then, too.”  
  
Jaskier tilts his face up and kisses him.  
  
Geralt makes a sound like he’s breaking a stranglehold, then surges forward to meet it. The kiss in Kerwald was chaste in comparison: this time he kisses Jaskier deep and long and lingering, mouth hot like a brand, gripping Jaskier’s hips in both wide palms as though Jaskier might think to run somewhere else.  
  
He laughs against Geralt’s lips, breathless. “The _whole_ time, really?”  
  
“You weren’t subtle.”  
  
“I could be subtle.”  
  
“You were _strange_ ,” Geralt says, heated, and crowds close, steering him by the waist, moving him around like it’s nothing. The backs of Jaskier’s knees hit the edge of the bed, and Geralt’s kissing him again, the hot, insistent press of tongue and scrape of stubble turning Jaskier inside out with want at such debilitating speed it almost reminds him of—  
  
But they’re nothing alike. Here he can feel his own desire plainly and still stop Geralt with one hand firm against his chest.  
  
The tension in it makes him tremble.  
  
“Can I—”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Jaskier laughs, feeling inexplicably tender. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”  
  
He touches the side of Geralt’s face. Geralt stares at him, gaze molten but hands obediently still where they grip on either side of Jaskier’s waist, anchoring. His skin is damp from the bath and glistening. There’s a spot on his jaw just below where the stubble is beginning to grow in that Jaskier badly wants to put his mouth on, and doesn’t. It makes his breath short to know that, maybe, he can.  
  
“Jaskier,” says Geralt roughly.  
  
“I’m having an epiphany about delayed gratification,” he murmurs, touching that spot on Geralt’s jaw with two fingers.  
  
Geralt’s hands flex over his hips. “Have it faster.”  
  
“You’re missing the core concept there, witcher,” Jaskier says mildly, but relents, sighing against Geralt’s mouth. His knees give, and he lets Geralt press him into the bed in one slow, inexorable motion, legs coming up to bracket Geralt’s hips on either side. It’s good, and then Geralt rucks Jaskier’s shirt up and over his head, and it’s _better_ , the shock of so much skin and Geralt’s mouth angling deep tearing a low, helpless moan from Jaskier’s throat.  
  
He feels rapidly overcome again, flushed hot with how badly he wants it, only he wants it differently.  
  
He pushes against Geralt’s chest and feels his rumbling groan.  
  
“What,” Geralt breathes against his mouth, relinquishing it.  
  
Jaskier hesitates before asking it this time. Geralt is hot and primed over him, every lean line reading very clearly as one thing, one inevitable outcome. Even his hips have begun to move between Jaskier’s thighs in the faintest pantomime of fucking.  
  
But Geralt is never only one thing, a truth Jaskier has known for as long as he’s known Geralt. He stills at a single touch. He’s gazing down at Jaskier expectantly.  
  
Jaskier’s tongue darts out to wet his swollen lips.  
  
“Can I fuck you?”  
  
Geralt’s mouth falls open around a breath that sounds as though it’s been punched out of him.  
  
It’s a line too far, Jaskier thinks, until it isn’t. The moment trembles, and then Geralt pushes back, kneeling between Jaskier’s thighs. His cock is half hard, his expression about as clear as mud, but his pupils are blown wide and black, a thin ring of gold surrounding them.  
  
To say Jaskier has entertained fantasies—well, he has. Of course he has. Sixteen years is a long time to spend wanting someone in one way or another, and he’s always had a vivid imagination. But none of them have quite prepared him for the sight of Geralt settling beside him on his forearms, shoulders hunched over the wide, scarred expanse of his back, hips angled just so.  
  
“Forget witchering,” Jaskier says, throat thick. “I could make a career writing ballads about the way you look right now.”  
  
“Do it, and see what happens.”  
  
“ _This_ ,” Jaskier continues, laying a hand over the smooth muscle of Geralt’s ass, “is a marvel. And I’ve seen a few marvels in my time.”  
  
Geralt twists his head to look at him. Jaskier’s mouth curves.  
  
“No, I have to say, the scary face is a bit lost on you like this.” He squeezes one round globe of Geralt’s ass, because if he never has the chance again he’ll be beside himself for squandering it. “Stay put. I’ll only be a moment.”  
  
Jaskier rolls off the bed, pulse drumming. He retrieves one of the little bottles of bath oil, uncorking it to the faint scent of lavender, and decides it will do. When he turns around, Geralt has shifted toward the center of the bed, the great, muscled lines of him all devastatingly on display. A heated ache pulls taut in the pit of Jaskier’s stomach. He squeezes the bottle of oil tightly in his palm, dizzyingly aware of how he intends to use it.  
  
“Right, well, that’s in my brain forever,” Jaskier says, divesting himself of his trousers with only a little fumbling. He’s painfully hard, despite having spent the past six days being tended to by some kind of literal sex fiend, which is just—well, if there could have been a silver lining, that might have been it. He’s nearly tempted to roll Geralt right back over and rub against him until they both spend, just to take some of the edge off.  
  
Then he’s _imagining_ it, and it’s worse.  
  
Jaskier kneels onto the bed next to Geralt’s hip.  
  
“Has anyone ever told you, you’re a lot to look at?”  
  
Geralt sounds faintly amused. “Only when there’s coin involved.”  
  
“Oh that’s a shame,” Jaskier says, voice low with honesty. It’s only because he’s paying attention that he sees the break in Geralt’s breathing, how it stills and rushes out of him a moment later. The angle makes it impossible to see Geralt’s face; the moment he thinks it, Geralt’s ducking his head down against his folded arms, hiding it even more completely.  
  
Jaskier nudges Geralt’s knees apart, settling between them. The scar from the bukavac stands out along Geralt’s shoulder blade, the skin pale and knotted where the worst of the damage was. He remembers thinking Geralt looked vulnerable while he’d tended it, and dismissing the thought.  
  
He doesn’t dismiss it now.  
  
He touches Geralt with oiled fingers and feels him tense. He pauses, tearing his eyes away to study the set of Geralt’s shoulders, which have gone tight, if not forbiddingly so. On an inhale, Jaskier rubs at Geralt with the blunt pad of his thumb, slow, not a tease but an acquainting, and feels him relax into it very slightly.  
  
Jaskier’s just barely gone inside with one finger when Geralt tenses hard all over again, and he stops.  
  
“What are you doing?” Geralt asks tightly.  
  
“What d’you mean what am I doing? I’m—you’ve done this before, haven’t you?”  
  
“I—yes.”  
  
Jaskier considers that carefully. “Alright. Didn’t factor in how your charming brand of reticence would play out in this context. _Should_ have. That’s on me.” He removes his hand from the cleft of Geralt’s ass momentarily to brace it against the straw-filled mattress and lean in close, fitting himself over Geralt’s spine. His chin rests against Geralt’s scarred shoulder blade. “You _have_ been fucked before. I feel like I need to be specific.”  
  
He feels more than hears Geralt’s impatient groan. “ _Yes_.”  
  
“Well. I don’t want to sound uncouth, Geralt, but my cock is a fair sight larger than—”  
  
“I’m not going to break,” Geralt says roughly.  
  
“Is that what you tell them?”  
  
In spite of having six feet of naked witcher spread out underneath him, Jaskier feels his arousal flag, a little. He blinks slowly, considering the men who must have heard that and believed it.  
  
“It isn’t how you’re thinking,” Geralt says.  
  
“Oh _now_ you know what I’m thinking.”  
  
“You’re being protective. It’s sweet.”  
  
“Oh, fuck you,” Jaskier says, flushing. “Turn over.”  
  
After a beat, Geralt does. Improbably, he’s smiling, faint but genuine: it reaches his eyes. Coupled with the rest of it, the effect is, on the whole, debilitating.  
  
Jaskier goes down on one elbow, wraps a hand around Geralt’s mostly softened cock, and, without preamble, takes it into his mouth.  
  
The low noise Geralt makes is one Jaskier will carry in his bones for the rest of his days.  
  
Jaskier sucks him to hardness with a straightforward focus that borders on vengeance. And Geralt, it turns out, _really_ enjoys having his cock sucked. He’s noisy about it, for one thing, letting out these punched out little gasps every time Jaskier does anything particularly clever with his mouth, and he’d meant to go about this with as much learned skill as he’s been able to muster over the years, but then Geralt groans, long and low and deep, and Jaskier’s brain sort of fizzles spectacularly as all the blood rushes in the opposite direction.  
  
Geralt’s cock hardens fully, thick and twitching on his tongue. Jaskier feels absolutely stupid with it, the size of it rapidly beginning to make Jaskier strain to take him all. He wraps a hand around the base of Geralt’s cock while he adjusts, then settles that hand on the thick, quivering muscle of Geralt’s thigh and sinks down, down, taking him into his throat.  
  
“Fuck.” Geralt’s hips jerk, not enough to choke but threatening it. “ _Fuck_ , Jaskier.”  
  
He sucks hard, swallowing around Geralt’s considerable girth. Fingers tangle in Jaskier’s hair and stay there, not pulling but anchoring him in place. Jaskier tests it, backing off just a little only to have Geralt’s fingers flex and hold him, cutting off his retreat. It reminds him wildly of the wyvern fight and then of nothing at all, because he is sucking Geralt of Rivia’s cock for the first time in his life, and it’s so _good_ his mind is almost quiet.  
  
Geralt’s hips flex in the tiniest upward seeking. Jaskier chokes, and still Geralt’s fingers are like long iron bars cradling the back of his skull in a grip that persists for several dragging seconds. Tears prick the corners of Jaskier’s eyes and he moans tremblingly, neck hot and arms straining to hold him up. He swallows hard around him again, and Geralt gives a half-shout and relents, grip slackening.  
  
Jaskier pulls off with one great heave of breath into his lungs. Form returns to his thoughts slowly; they gather and coalesce like dust motes caught in a single beam of light. The thickness of Geralt’s cock is a pressure against his cheek, a phantom one in his jaw, and Jaskier turns his face into it, nosing the underside almost thoughtlessly.  
  
When he looks up, Geralt is staring. There’s barely any gold left in his eyes; it’s been all but swallowed up by black pupil.  
  
“Question for you, about witcher stamina,” Jaskier says, voice noticeably craggy. He kisses the wet head of Geralt’s cock without breaking eye contact, thrilling at the way it makes Geralt’s eyelids go half-lidded for an instant. He does it again, because he can, slow and unselfconscious. “If I let you come down my throat, will you still be able to get it up enough for me to fuck you after?”  
  
The clench of Geralt’s fingers in his hair is as rough as the exhale that follows.  
  
“What’s me being hard have to do with you fucking me?”  
  
Jaskier frowns. “I want you to like it.”  
  
“I’ll like it,” Geralt says, unexpectedly soft.  
  
Jaskier elbows himself up, fixing Geralt with a serious look. “What sort of men have been fucking you?”  
  
“None, lately.”  
  
“Lately,” Jaskier repeats, a little scornful. “Don’t look at me like that.”  
  
Geralt huffs out an amused breath. “I don’t know how else to look at you.”  
  
There’s something so nakedly honest in the way Geralt says it that Jaskier is moved to let it lie. The raw heat in Geralt’s eyes has transmuted into something almost yielding. For a moment he looks so unguarded it makes Jaskier’s teeth ache.  
  
“Bend this knee,” Jaskier says with a guiding touch, and Geralt does. “Are you always this good at taking direction?”  
  
“Depends on the incentive.”  
  
“Let me incentivize you, then,” says Jaskier, and reaches for the oil.  
  
This time when he takes Geralt into his mouth, it’s with two fingers stroking firmly over Geralt’s ass. He waits until the muscle relaxes, teasing a finger in slowly and then sucking hard as it sinks all the way in to the second knuckle. Geralt’s thigh jerks. His leg stays dutifully bent. He groans as Jaskier takes him in just to the edge of his throat, and it’s so tempting to take him further, but he doesn't. If Geralt chokes him on his cock like that again he won’t be able to _think_ , and he wants to be able to make this good. He wants Geralt to like this the way Jaskier wants to give it to him—which, Jaskier is beginning to think, isn’t in a way many people have.  
  
He works a second finger into him, and a third. Geralt’s thigh is quaking with near constant tremors that cease only when Jaskier drives into him hard, wrist straining with the effort. He’s leaking steadily in Jaskier’s mouth, less vocal now that he’s close, and Jaskier tongues at it, relentless, earning a clenched fist in his hair as Geralt’s hips strain toward the twinned assault with jerking movements.  
  
Jaskier’s own arousal is almost an afterthought. It beats through his blood in hot bursts, steady but not all-consuming, affording him the space to move around it. It isn’t the first time he’s focused so intently on a lover—point of pride, Jaskier is as _good_ at giving pleasure as he is at receiving it—but the memory of desire blotting out everything else is fresh enough that he cleaves to the twitch and heave of Geralt’s body with particular determination, wringing pleasure from him as deliberately as he knows how.  
  
Geralt comes almost silently. His breath catches, and liquid heat fills Jaskier’s mouth in pulses. Jaskier’s fingers fuck into him once, twice, and go still, rubbing hard against a spot that makes Geralt buck once deep into his throat, his leg giving out at last and going slack against the straw-filled mattress.  
  
He pulls off, blinking up at him. Geralt’s eyes are closed, lips parted, the hard lines of his face all faintly unspooled in the aftermath of pleasure.  
  
Jaskier leans his head on the meaty ridge of Geralt’s hip and moves his fingers experimentally where they’re still speared inside of him, breath going tight when it coaxes Geralt’s eyes open, revealing them glazed and unfocused.  
  
“You look like you’ve just gone into one of your trances,” Jaskier murmurs.  
  
Geralt exhales, fingers light in Jaskier’s hair. His cock has only half softened, and Jaskier glances at it pointedly.  
  
“Witcher stamina,” says Geralt, and hauls Jaskier close by the nape of his neck.  
  
It dislodges his fingers, which bears some protesting—but then Geralt is kissing the taste of himself out of Jaskier’s mouth with slow, hot sweeps of his tongue, and Jaskier goes utterly boneless against him, his own pulse very loud in his ears.  
  
The sudden advent of Geralt’s hand on his cock is so blindingly good that Jaskier bows into it with his whole body before stopping him with a hand on his wrist.  
  
“Really don’t need any help there at the moment, Geralt,” he says, voice catching. “My measly human stamina doesn’t quite compare to yours, I don’t think.”  
  
“You still smell like him,” Geralt growls, low, nosing the column of Jaskier’s throat.  
  
“Ah. Well. That’s a mood-killer.”  
  
“Not really,” says Geralt, and flips them both over with one great heaving push.  
  
Jaskier gasps into Geralt’s mouth, neatly caged in by the muscled sprawl of Geralt’s body slotting over his. The heat of it is obliterating. He feels at once anchored and unmoored, pinned by the steady, rhythmic thrusting of Geralt’s hips.  
  
“What are you—oh, you complete brute. Really?”  
  
Geralt bites what’s sure to be a bruise into the side of Jaskier’s neck. “Do you want me to stop?”  
  
“Stop what?” He laughs a little shakily. “What did we decide you’re doing, exactly? Holding me down and marking me like some common beast?”  
  
“Not hearing an answer.”  
  
His hips slow in their movement. Jaskier feels him fully hard again and heavy in the crease of his thigh, rubbing mindlessly back and forth. It lights up some wretched, primal lizard part of his stupid brain, and of course Geralt would be like this: perfectly docile one moment and near feral the next. It’s horrific.  
  
“You’re horrific,” Jaskier says, kissing him. “Don’t stop.”  
  
Geralt leaves Jaskier’s cock pointedly untouched. He rubs himself along the join of hip and thigh with a single-mindedness that jolts heat all the way down to Jaskier’s toes, cinching around his chest to make his breathing ragged. It’s a parody of fucking, and not even that—it’s exceedingly to a purpose. Toward the end, Geralt takes himself into his fist, face tucked into the pale length of Jaskier’s throat. He comes so quietly Jaskier doesn’t even realize it’s happening until he feels it hot against his stomach, his chest, the spur of his hipbone. His toes flex and curl. He bites at Geralt’s mouth. Geralt kisses him softly back, rubbing himself into Jaskier’s skin.  
  
Jaskier feels so hot he might die with it.  
  
“I want to fuck you so badly I can’t stand it,” Jaskier says. “But I’m not going to last. This is so depressing.”  
  
Geralt’s voice is a low, satisfied rumble. “I don’t need you to last.”  
  
“Oh, well. You do know how to flatter a man’s ego, don’t you.” He elbows himself up. “Get off.”  
  
Geralt rolls to the side with all the good grace of a man who’s recently come twice in quick succession. Jaskier can’t even begrudge him for it: it looks beautiful on him. He sort of wants to make him look like that all the time. It’s a shockingly difficult thought to hold on to when he also can’t quite wrap his head around a reality in which he’s allowed this more than once. Knowing Geralt, he’s going to have some misguided crisis of conscience after this and complicate everything.  
  
Geralt is gazing at him unreservedly from underneath long, pale lashes. “You’re not how I thought you’d be.”  
  
Jaskier’s thoughts stutter and stop.  
  
“How?” he asks, and then: “No. That’s the wrong question. You’ve thought of this?”  
  
Geralt looks briefly pained, as though perhaps he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.  
  
“I’ve thought of it,” he says quietly.  
  
“In Kerwald?”  
  
“Also in Kerwald.”  
  
Jaskier opens and closes his mouth several times, but, for once, no words come out.  
  
“If I’d known that’s all it would take to shut you up,” Geralt says, amused.  
  
“You’re a horrible man,” Jaskier tells him, sitting up. His cock is an insistent ache vying for attention with his gently shaken world view, and he fists the base of it roughly, watching Geralt’s eyes follow the movement with casual interest. “I’m reevaluating every confidence I’ve ever had about my ability to read people. I’m supposed to be the worldly one.”  
  
“You?”  
  
“Monsters are your thing. People are mine.” He coaxes Geralt onto his stomach with a firm touch. “Keep up, Geralt, we’ve only been at this for a decade and a half.”  
  
Geralt tilts his hips up by way of answer, which, at the moment, Jaskier struggles to find fault with.  
  
He stares down at Geralt’s improbably broad back, the frankly unreasonable swell of his ass, his scarred legs splayed to make room for Jaskier between them. He thumbs over where Geralt is still slick and open, testing the muscle and meeting almost no resistance at all: he accepts the intrusion beautifully, the muscles of his back flexing as his hips tilt almost sweetly back, and Jaskier groans, threadbare and wanting, squeezing the base of his cock so tightly it hurts.  
  
Badly in need of a distraction, he says, “I’m going to put my mouth here, unless you’ve got strong feelings against it.”  
  
Geralt’s hips jerk. “Thought you were going to fuck me.”  
  
“If I fuck you now, I’ll come before I’m even all the way inside.”  
  
Geralt clenches helplessly around him. Jaskier stares at it, mouth dry, imagining all that tight heat around his cock. He drags his thumb back, relinquishing it, and bends to lay a kiss over the base of Geralt’s spine. Then he drags his mouth lower, spreading Geralt with both hands.  
  
“Or maybe you like that thought,” he murmurs, and licks over him with the flat of his tongue.  
  
Geralt is quieter at this than he was about getting his cock sucked. His body, though, is doubly more responsive, a fact by which Jaskier is delighted until it gets in the way. Geralt’s hips are in nearly constant motion, driving back against the steady, seeking pressure of Jaskier’s tongue and then twitching away as though it’s too much. He bites softly over the swell of Geralt’s ass once and says, “Hold still,” and Geralt does, shaking in place when Jaskier drives into him, soft and wet and for as long as Jaskier wants without having to chase the taste of him. He lets up to say, “That’s good, you’re so good, thank you,” half thoughtless with it, and Geralt’s whole body quakes with one fierce tremor.  
  
“Oh,” Jaskier says a little wonderingly. He kisses over where his tongue was just spearing Geralt open. “Soft touch for a bit of praise, is that it?”  
  
“ _Jaskier_.”  
  
“You do take direction well,” he says, replacing his mouth with his fingers. Three of them slide into Geralt easily. He plays over Geralt’s rim with a fourth, eyes glued to it. “Will you take me so well?”  
  
“Will you stop playing with my ass long enough to find out?”  
  
Jaskier laughs, tenderness blooming in the center of his chest. He kisses over Geralt’s spine again, shifting close. His cock bumps against his wrist, and with a sigh Jaskier removes his hand. His throat feels thick. The head of his cock catches against Geralt’s spit-slick rim, and he has to tear his gaze away.  
  
“I’m not—fuck, I can’t,” he says, breath huffing out of him.  
  
“Then don’t,” Geralt says, and shifts back against him.  
  
With that tiny movement, Jaskier’s inside, just barely: a half-inch that makes his head swim, the heat of it beating ruthlessly through his blood.  
  
He grips Geralt’s waist hard.  
  
“Geralt… the, ah, _fuck_ , you bastard, the oil.”  
  
“No.” Geralt pushes back again. Jaskier sinks in another half-inch, biting back a sound. “Fuck the oil. I want to feel you.”  
  
All of Jaskier’s breath leaves him in a noisy rush. It's the first thing Geralt’s voiced out loud that he wants, and it neatly annihilates every protest. It’s a bit mortifying, really: now that Geralt’s said it, all Jaskier wants to do is give it to him.  
  
“Alright. That’s good,” Jaskier says, easing in another inch. It’s so hot he feels like the one being split open. “Fuck, Geralt, you’re _so good_.”  
  
Geralt groans, low. It’s almost inaudible.  
  
“Tell me again.” Jaskier’s voice is nearly a whisper. He watches Geralt’s shoulders clench, watches him tuck his face against his forearms. He sinks into him deeper, a slow, inevitable slide into molten heat that he feels in the base of his spine, in his toes. He’s barely aware of shaping the words in his mouth as he speaks them. “Tell me how you want it.”  
  
He's so focused on trying to read the line of Geralt’s shoulders that he bottoms out before he realizes it’s happening. He lets out a breath, touching his forehead to the back of Geralt’s neck. He feels hot, everywhere, a pulsing heat that starts at the tight clutch of Geralt’s body and spreads.  
  
“Or can’t you?” He bites down hard on his own lip. “Geralt.”  
  
“Stay,” Geralt says in a voice like crushed gravel. He sounds as though he’s had to mine that word from some place very deep inside of him.  
  
Jaskier touches a hand to Geralt’s ribs very gently. He breathes against the muscle of Geralt’s back, slow alongside the thundering of his heart. He feels himself oddly suspended, held within the grasp of whatever Geralt can bring himself to ask for. It beats back the steady inferno in his blood into something gentler.  
  
“Good,” he says softly into the back of Geralt’s neck. “Alright.”  
  
Geralt breathes out harshly. The line of his back bows a little so that his hips become flush with the bedding, and Jaskier follows the movement. It jostles him just slightly, a sweet shock of friction that fizzles in his brain. He has to brace himself against Geralt’s back with one hand to accommodate the new angle, holding him down. Not that he could. Not that Geralt couldn’t break out of it if he wanted. He doesn’t.  
  
After several moments, Geralt clenches around him meaningfully, and Jaskier huffs a wounded sort of gasp into his shoulder.  
  
“Can you—”  
  
Jaskier can’t think. “Yes.”  
  
“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Geralt rumbles.  
  
Jaskier laughs, breathless, hips rocking so shallowly he’s barely even moving. All of his thoughts are a faded, distant white. Geralt rocks back against him, hard, and pleasure erupts in a merciless blaze down Jaskier’s spine.  
  
He leans more of his weight into him, grip shifting to the nape of Geralt’s neck and squeezing.  
  
Geralt unspools, a little bit, underneath it.  
  
“As hard as you can,” Geralt says, “for as long as you can give it to me.”  
  
“ _Oh_ , fuck, Geralt,” Jaskier mutters, hips bucking once, involuntarily. The muscles in Geralt’s broad back ripple and flex on an indrawn breath. Jaskier has been fucked often enough that he knows how to make this achingly good, but his focus feels so shot that he can hardly keep up beyond what his body keeps telling him with every heavy, pulsing heartbeat: _close, deep, hard, this one_.  
  
He drives into Geralt at the steep angle he’s made, bracing himself with a hand on Geralt’s neck, the other gripping tight around his hip. The heated drag and clutch of Geralt’s body is shatteringly good, it’s _too_ good. Geralt takes him better than he could ever have imagined, and he _has_ , gods, he has imagined it. He’s seen Geralt’s naked body too often not to have fantasized about a sprawling multitude of ways in which he might have it, only none of those compare to the vulnerable reality of fucking Geralt open like this in the way that he asked for, because he asked for it. After this, every casual daydream will seem hollow.  
  
The pressure builds in his throat, in his spine, a searing heat that expands so relentlessly it’s almost cruel.  
  
Geralt’s breaths are coming fast. He’s _quiet_ , hips flush with the bedding, a still point for Jaskier to fuck into. Jaskier changes the angle again, flattening himself over the warm breadth of Geralt’s back. It affords him less leverage, but like this he can hear the change in Geralt’s breathing—it catches just as Jaskier rocks into him. He does it again, the combined movement of their bodies jostling Geralt’s shoulders, and there’s a loud, gasping groan as Geralt lifts his head from the cradle of his folded arms.  
  
“Let me hear you, Geralt, please,” Jaskier says, and he’s begging, but he’s also threading fingers into long white hair just tightly enough to be more than a suggestion.  
  
Geralt’s voice is a rasp. “You’re good at this.”  
  
As doused as he is in heat, Jaskier feels himself go warm all over.  
  
“I’m close,” he says softly. It’s half apology, but Geralt exhales on a quiet groan, tilting his hips back to meet his next thrust, and the next. “I can stop before I—if you’d rather I didn’t—”  
  
Geralt clenches around him mercilessly. “I said I wanted to feel you.”  
  
Jaskier ducks his head into the bend of Geralt’s neck, hips stuttering. He finds the pulse point beneath Geralt’s jaw and mouths at it, eyes drifting shut as he fucks furiously into the hot give of Geralt’s body with every intent of coming inside. It’s less a precipice approaching—he’s been edging along this precipice ever since he got his mouth on Geralt—and more of a cresting wave that slams over him with bludgeoning force, searing white through the inside of his skull, pulling a gut-punched noise from deep inside of him that he bites into Geralt’s shoulder over the wild shuddering of his hips. He empties himself in long, hot pulses, Geralt’s body tightening underneath him as he takes it, quiet but not noiseless, the lines of him solid and yielding at once.  
  
The wave recedes. Jaskier slows, not quite stilling: he continues to rock himself gently inside as he softens, and it’s this that makes the line of Geralt’s shoulders quake, a soft moan falling from his lips.  
  
Geralt’s hips make a tiny seeking motion into the bed, and Jaskier does still at that.  
  
“Are you—” He huffs a breath, faint incredulity straining the edges of his voice. “Is there something I can help you with?”  
  
“Yeah,” Geralt says roughly, and rolls onto his back.  
  
“Oh.” Jaskier swallows hard. “You are... fuck, Geralt, if I could feel any part of my body right now I’d ask you to put that inside me.”  
  
He throws himself down on his side, facing Geralt and marveling at his ridiculous, mostly hard cock. He takes him in hand, strokes him hard and to a purpose, voice run through with the lassitude of orgasm.  
  
“Are there limits to witcher stamina, or do you just sort of fuck until beset upon by the next monster or beast?” Jaskier asks, tongue clumsy and careless over the syllables. “Academic question. Definitely not suggesting we do this in the middle of the woods and see what happens, in _flagrante delicto_ seems like a terrible place to start a fight, and I do say that with some experience. No wonder you’re all—"  
  
“Jaskier.” Geralt rolls onto his side, mirroring him. He clutches the back of Jaskier’s neck in an iron grip. “Shut up.”  
  
“—sterile, you know, because the population would be overrun otherwise—”  
  
Geralt slots their mouths together, kissing the curling half-smile from Jaskier’s lips. He pumps into Jaskier’s fist, fucks into Jaskier’s mouth with his tongue in the same rhythm, and Jaskier feels a little wild with how hot that is. But the heat of it is undemanding, beating through him slowly. He fashions himself into a thing for Geralt to use, his hand, his mouth, the tight, twisting circle of his fingers, and Geralt spills over them with a rattling groan that Jaskier swallows greedily.  
  
It takes a touch to Jaskier’s wrist for him to let go. He blinks at Geralt, smiling.  
  
“You thought of this,” he says, half stupid and hazy with pleasure.  
  
Geralt makes a low noise in his throat and kisses him.  
  
Jaskier drifts off sometime after. He has a vague recollection of Geralt leaving the bed, then returning to it, a cool cloth on Jaskier’s cock that startles him, and then the gentling warmth of Geralt’s broad body settling close. He turns into it, fitting himself along the line of Geralt’s spine.  
  
He sleeps well for the first time in days.  
  
  
  
They leave the village the next morning. Annie, the farrier’s wife, can’t quite look Jaskier in the eye, then appears briefly scandalized when Jaskier presses her for her measurements, notebook and writing implement in hand. For the seamstress, of course, next time he’s in Toussaint, and anyway it all could have been a lot worse, and do remember the kindnesses of witchers every once in a while.  
  
“Or just the one,” Jaskier amends, eyes flicking to the cornered set of Geralt’s shoulders as he weathers the villagers’ gratitude with very little grace.  
  
To be fair to them, the villagers look equally as wrong-footed about expressing their thanks as Geralt does about receiving it. He sees Molly hand Geralt an iron skillet and storm off, muttering something under her breath. Geralt looks down at the skillet, then at Jaskier as though for instruction.  
  
Jaskier throws his head back and laughs.  
  
Geralt had foregone the reward for the posting about the well, supposedly because the villagers had all of two orens to rub together amongst them and Ban Ard had already promised to pay handsomely for the retrieval of their wayward mage. Though Jaskier doubts retrieval was ever what they had in mind if they knew what else he was, and if they were specifically looking to entrust the task to witchers.  
  
“Why do you suppose they didn’t mention the desire demon bit in the first place, anyway?” Jaskier asks once they’re on the road. He’s plodding along next to Geralt and Roach this time. It feels like ages since he’s stretched his legs, and also—well, he keeps remembering there’s a severed head somewhere in Roach’s saddlebags, and he sort of doesn’t want to be anywhere near it. “Or is it bad form to take a creature like that and teach him magic? I admit I haven’t the foggiest idea what sort of rules hold in places like that.”  
  
“It was likely a cover up,” Geralt says tonelessly. “Places like that hold on to a lot of secrets. This one refused to be kept.”  
  
“Hm. I’m sorry you had to kill him.” He feels Geralt’s gaze on the top of his head. “I mean—he was hardly an innocent child. And he was actively feeding on my soul, and all. But part of him was human.”  
  
Flatly, Geralt says, “I’m not sure it wasn’t the worse part.”  
  
“Well,” Jaskier allows, trying to skew his tone into something lighter. “I know how you don’t like to get involved.”  
  
“He involved himself with me when he touched you.”  
  
Jaskier glances up, startled. Geralt’s eyes are on the road, the line of his mouth hard. It’s an imposing look, a cold one. It’s barely flickered since they left the village, and Jaskier is familiar by now with Geralt’s ever shifting moods, but he’s a little uncertain how to hold it this time.  
  
“Right. So,” he says, looking away. “To Ban Ard, then? We’ll collect the reward, and afterward I think we should—”  
  
“Afterward,” Geralt says, “we should part ways.”  
  
Jaskier stops dead in his tracks.  
  
“Oh, I knew you were going to do this.”  
  
Geralt pulls Roach to a halt, brow furrowed. “Do what?”  
  
“No, no, go on,” Jaskier says, waving a hand at him. He takes a few leisurely steps up the road and turns, giving Geralt the full breadth of him to rail against. “I wouldn’t want to take the wind out of your sails right before you’re getting ready to do a bit of self-flagellating moral grandstanding. It’d be unkind.”  
  
Geralt blinks at him as though Jaskier has done exactly that. It feels good, actually.  
  
“Waking up to your pointed absence _was_ a bit of a clue.” He squints up the road, at the fields of long grasses, the shadow of mountains bruising a distant skyline. “Come on, Geralt, we’re wasting daylight.”  
  
Geralt’s expression has gone faintly mutinous. At length, he heaves a disgruntled sigh, dismounting with a sound of jangling metal and scraping leather, boots thumping solidly on the ground. Jaskier raises his eyebrows at Geralt’s approach, clocking the broad, stubborn set of his shoulders, the deadly serious look in his golden eyes.  
  
He’s rarely ever felt so fond and yet so irritated. It sticks in his chest like brambles.  
  
"You asked me once,” Geralt says, forceful, “if there was anything I keep."  
  
"Besides Roach,” Jaskier corrects patiently.  
  
"Besides Roach,” Geralt allows. He’s quiet for a long moment. “I don't."  
  
Jaskier tilts his head. "Because all intimacy is fleeting?”  
  
"No.” Geralt frowns, looking hunted. “I mean yes, it is, but that isn’t… Things around me tend to—” The line of his jaw clenches unhappily. “I’ll ruin you."  
  
It's a ridiculous thing to say. Were it to come from anyone else’s mouth, Jaskier would laugh and call it nonsense. Privately he thinks that if Geralt used his words around people as often as he used them around his horse, he wouldn’t be so clumsy with them. He throws them around like blunt instruments, coarse or imprecise or both, but sometimes they come out like this instead, so wholly lacking in artistry or design that Jaskier feels himself unwillingly taken in by their guilelessness. Even when the things Geralt says make him angry, it’s a strange comfort to know that he means them.  
  
“Ruin me. Of course,” he says, softening. “That’s a good line. I might use it.”  
  
Geralt’s gaze heats. "This isn't one of your ballads, Jaskier."  
  
"You think painting yourself as some harbinger of inevitable misfortune makes more sense than what I write in my ballads?" Jaskier's tone flattens. "For such an honest man, you really are full of shit, Geralt. The challenge for me is remembering it. You strut around with so much conviction that sometimes it's hard not to believe you."  
  
“You’re being _naïve_ ,” Geralt growls. “You almost died twice in a week’s time and still think this is all some grand adventure—"  
  
“You gloomy old bastard,” Jaskier rebukes, only it comes out more tender than he’d like. He crosses his arms over his chest in a vain effort to gain back ground. “I can’t believe people say I’m the dramatic one. You really think I never got into trouble before meeting you? Do you know how many times I was thrown over somebody’s knee in school when I was still learning my letters—”  
  
“We aren’t talking about some bloated old cuckold at a royal banquet,” Geralt says, glaring.  
  
“Aren’t you the one who always says you’d rather face a drowner than a king?”  
  
“Why? Why follow me around?” Geralt snarls. “You hate it.”  
  
Jaskier frowns. “I don’t hate it.”  
  
“You complain about the cold. You complain about the heat. You complain about your boots sticking in the mud. The rain ruins your silks, you hate going to sleep on an empty stomach. You complain when we run out of wine, _a lot_.”  
  
“Well.”  
  
Geralt’s expression is thunderous. “Well, _what_.”  
  
“Nothing.” Jaskier uncrosses his arms, unsmiling. “It’s only that you’ve got it wrong.”  
  
He snatches the silver wolf medallion hanging from Geralt’s neck and twists it tightly around his fist. Geralt’s lips part, his golden eyes widening. He lets himself be pulled, or maybe he’s too startled to resist. Jaskier meets his gaze unflinchingly, so close their breaths are mingling.  
  
Firmly, he says, “You’re not keeping _me_ , Geralt. _I’m_ keeping you.”  
  
Geralt’s brows hitch as though absorbing an internal blow. For a moment he looks almost laid low by it, and Jaskier wants to laugh. The man faces monsters better suited to people’s nightmares as a matter of course without flinching; just now he looks a bit like cornered prey.  
  
“Now if we could please skip over all this tiresome nonsense about you doing me a favor—"  
  
Geralt’s lips are a warm, unexpected pressure. He kisses him without pretense, here in the middle of the road in broad daylight, his medallion clutched steadfastly in the center of Jaskier’s palm.  
  
It is neither a quiet moment nor a loud one. It rings through him, clear as a bell, falling into the lit spaces where Jaskier exists without running.  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> the consent tags encompass a short-lived sexual relationship with a desire demon that manipulates feelings and desires and, to some extent, controls minds. i originally called this dubious consent, but have since added the rape/non-con tag to prevent further harm from coming to anyone who might be made uncomfortable by the desire demon parts of the story. limited pov is a tricky thing. the desire demon draws on and at best magnifies desire--in this case, jaskier's--that is already there, meaning that, as written, jaskier would have slept with askel regardless if propositioned. this is a difficult thing to convey textually, and in fact something i may have failed to convey textually altogether, so i've increased the content warnings to reflect variations in interpretation.
> 
> the mind control tag encompasses the desire demon telling the inhabitants of the village what to do when it suits him (in one scene, he tells them to leave the tavern and stand outside, staring in; in another, he tells the villagers to attack jaskier and geralt), and forcing jaskier to forget something he sees and then to temporarily forget geralt. it is also implied that the villagers are being mind controlled into doing odd things (setting clothes on fire, burying silver in the ground) by the demon.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [hsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hsu/pseuds/hsu) Log in to view. 




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